Travel and tourism locations that are nominated for a Travel Gem will have a scoring system which we use to determine viability, effectiveness and review ratings.

We do not rely on reviews alone, because it just takes one or two disgruntled reviews to drop your business overall score.

To navigate around this issue, our tech team developed a simple formula and algorithm that calculates the rating scores for us.

We believe in full transparency and thus feel it is only fair to disclose to our clients and tourism establishments how we select and nominate our scores.

Our Simplified Rating Score System:

1. Average Rating Calculation:

Agreggating the reviews from API services across the internet, TripAdvisor, Trust Pilot, Google, and Facebook API.

We then use a 4-tier formula approach to determine the best approximations.

These values are summed and transposed as:

Where:

R_i​ = Rating given by the i-th reviewer

n = Total number of reviews

2. Score Adjustment Based on Recency:

If recency is considered, newer reviews might be weighted more heavily. For instance, we could use a weighted average:

Where:

W_i​​ = Weight assigned to the i-th review based on recency or reviewer influence

3. Incorporate Review Volume:

Adjust the score to reflect review volume. For instance:

Where:

• V = Total number of reviews
• k = A constant to balance between the average rating and the number of reviews

This formula gives more weight to the average rating if the review volume is high, but stabilizes the score with lower review volumes.

4. Overall Score Calculation:

Combining the weighted rating and review volume adjustment, the overall score could be:

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Example Calculation

Assume we have the following data for a location:

• Ratings: 4, 5, 3, 4, 5
• Weights (based on recency): 1, 1, 0.5, 0.8, 1 (more recent reviews have higher weights)
• Number of reviews V = 5
• Constant k = 10 (just an example value)

Calculate the Average Rating:

Calculate Adjusted Score:

Overall Score:

Thankfully, we do not have to pull out a calculator and do this manually, instead, we use a script to automatically calculate the scores for our clients:

This simplified formula is for our approximation and is freely available to our clients to view, to ensure full transparency and improve our quality services.