Weather affects our opinion!

Reviews may not be as objective as they seem. Brandes and Dover researched how weather conditions influence user reviews; they report that their study “uses a unique dataset that combines 12 years of data on hotel bookings and reviews, with weather condition information at a consumer’s home and hotel address. The results show that bad weather increases review provision and reduces rating scores for past consumption experiences. Moreover, 6.5% more reviews are written on rainy days and that these reviews are 0.1 points lower, accounting for 59% of the difference in average rating scores between four- and five-star hotels in our data. These results are consistent with a scenario in which bad weather (i) induces negative consumer mood, lowering rating scores, and (ii) makes consumers less time-constrained, which increases review provision. Additional analyses with various automated sentiment measures for almost 300,000 review texts support this scenario: reviews on rainy days show a significant reduction in reviewer positivity and happiness, yet are longer and more detailed.

Leif Brandes and Yaniv Dover.  “Offline Context Affects Online Reviews:  The Effect of Post-Consumption Weather.”  Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucac003