Booking & TripAdvisorBooking & TripAdvisorHotel and travel reviews are unusually rich data, and unusually annoying to extract. Booking.com and TripAdvisor are the two big sources, they structure their reviews differently from each other, and both differ from a general review site like Trustpilot. Getting a clean export means respecting those differences rather than flattening them. This guide covers what to watch for on each.
The single most important thing to understand before you export is that Booking.com and TripAdvisor do not describe a review the same way.
Booking.com scores each stay out of 10, and splits the written review into two explicit parts: what the guest liked, and what they disliked. Guests are prompted for each separately, so the positive and the negative arrive pre-sorted. A Booking review is really a rating plus a liked field plus a disliked field, often with the traveller’s country and type of trip attached.
TripAdvisor rates out of 5 bubbles, and gives each review a title and a single body of text, more like a classic review. It usually carries a trip type and a stay date, and often sub-ratings for things like location, service and value.
A tool that assumes one shape will quietly damage the other. Feed a Booking review into a single-text-field model and you lose the positive/negative split. Feed a TripAdvisor review into a positive/negative model and you get an empty column and a confused one. Exporting both well means the tool knows which platform it is on.
The scales are the thing people get wrong most often, and the mistake is easy to make and hard to spot.
An 8 on Booking.com and a 4 on TripAdvisor are both “pretty good”, but 8 out of 10 and 4 out of 5 are not the same number, and you cannot drop them into one column and sort. Worse, if you convert carelessly, you can turn a strong Booking score into a middling one or the reverse.
The right handling keeps both truths: the platform’s original score in one column, and a normalised score on a common scale in another, so you can compare a Booking hotel and a TripAdvisor hotel fairly without pretending an 8 is a 4. There is a dedicated article on getting this right: Booking vs TripAdvisor rating scales.
Pulling both platforms together, the fields worth capturing:
The trip-type and country fields are more valuable in travel than almost anywhere else, because complaints are so often segment-specific. Families complain about different things than business travellers, and having those in columns lets you see it.
Assuming a tool that handles both platforms:
ExportReviews’s Booking and TripAdvisor exporter handles both platforms in one extension, detecting the platform automatically and preserving each one’s structure and scale.
Hospitality is one of the fields where review text pays off fastest, because the complaints are concrete and fixable: a specific room, a check-in delay, a breakfast that ran out. Read the negatives in order and the recurring operational problems name themselves.
The Booking positive/negative split is a gift here. You can read a property’s “disliked” column on its own, ignoring the praise entirely, and get straight to the list of things guests actually want fixed. That is a shortcut you do not get on platforms that blend praise and criticism into one paragraph. There is more on this in analysing hotel reviews at scale.
The usual habits apply, and travel reviews add one wrinkle: they can be unusually personal, describing specific stays and sometimes specific staff. Do not republish traveller names, do not build profiles of individual reviewers, keep the data on your own device, and pace your requests. Aggregate analysis of what guests complain about is a world away from compiling files on the guests themselves, and only the first is a good idea.
They rate on different scales and structure reviews differently. Booking.com scores out of 10 and splits each review into a liked and a disliked part; TripAdvisor rates out of 5 bubbles with a single body of text. A tool that assumes one shape will mangle the other, which is why exporting both properly means understanding both.
Yes, and it is one of the most useful things about its data. Guests are prompted separately for what they liked and what they did not, so each review arrives already sorted into a positive and a negative field. Keeping those as two columns rather than merging them preserves a distinction that is expensive to reconstruct later.
Not without converting first. An 8 out of 10 on Booking is not an 8 out of 5 on TripAdvisor, and eyeballing them side by side is a mistake. A good export normalises both to a common scale in one column while keeping each platform's original number in another, so you can compare fairly without losing the source value.
Where it exists, yes. Both platforms let a property respond to reviews, and that response plus its date can be captured into their own columns. For hospitality analysis this matters, because how and how fast a property answers complaints is part of the story the star score hides.
You can export what any traveller browsing the listing can see, since those reviews are public. Bulk access to a property's own reviews through official channels is built for the property's managers; a browser exporter reads the public review section the same way a prospective guest would.
Ready to export Booking & TripAdvisor reviews?
Export hotel and travel reviews from Booking.com and TripAdvisor to CSV, Excel or JSON. Both rating scales preserved, one extension for both platforms.
See the Booking & TripAdvisor exporter