ΝEW YORK, N.Y. - It’s human nature to form opinions concerning the nature and disposition of tourists according to where they call home. RewardExpert – a free service that helps users take full advantage of credit card points and travel rewards – set out to answer the question: RewardExpert took a look at hard data to come up with a definitive and objective ranking. This ranking relies on a data set of 878,561 user reviews of a total of 4,333 hotels that include both the reviewer’s location and a numerical rating.
“We can’t help but make judgements about people based on where they are from,” says RewardExpert CEO and co-founder Roman Shteyn. “It is common belief that Southerners are known for their kindness and hospitality, whereas New Yorkers are perceived as rude and loudmouthed. Yet do any of these conceptions hold true in practice? By analyzing user review data, we set out to achieve an objective assessment of which states are most and least good natured.”
The report found the top three grumpiest states and locations are:
- Washington, D.C. – While not technically a state, we couldn't leave out our nation’s capital. D.C. takes first place as the home of the grumpiest tourists nation-wide and is the most over-represented in our set of negative hotel reviews, with 882 more than we estimated based on its 0.2% share of the US population.
- Colorado – Second to DC in crankiness are tourists hailing from the state of Colorado, who are distinguished by having the lowest average hotel rating in the country (3.82 on a five-point scale out of 4696 reviews).
- Oregon – Coming in at number three on our list is Oregon. With 14.98% negative reviews, 33% more negative reviews than expected, and an average rating of 3.88, Oregon ranked consistently high on all three indicators that we evaluated. As the rest of our top ten will show, the West Coast as a whole is home to a sizable number of disgruntled travelers.
The three states home to the happiest travelers are:
- Louisiana – First on our list of states home to the happiest and most satisfied of tourists is Louisiana. Louisiana earned its place at the top of our list on the strength of its highest national average hotel rating of 4.18]
- Mississippi – With one exception, states that made the cut as homes of the top ten happiest tourists are 1) in the South Atlantic or Midwestern regions, and/or 2) have small populations. Coming in at number two, Mississippi is not an exception.
- New Hampshire – Tourists from New Hampshire come in third on our list, primarily on the strength of their lowest national rate of one- and two-star reviews in the data set we analyzed (8.76%), supported by their sixth highest average hotel rating (4.095).
“To determine our list, we ranked states by three key metrics: the number of one- and two-star reviews proportional to population; the number of one- and two-star reviews as a proportion of all reviews from that state in our data set; and the overall average rating for all reviews by users from that state,” says Shteyn. “We then combined these three into composite scores for grumpiness. This allowed us to account for each state’s population share and to adjust the available data to make it more representative of the country’s population distribution.”
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