Expedia Star Ratings vs Guest Ratings: Who Sets Each

What is an Expedia star rating, and who sets it?

An Expedia star rating is a property class that tells travelers what to expect in terms of furniture, services and amenities. It is not based on guest reviews. Who sets it depends on the country: where local authorities designate an official rating, in regions that Expedia's star ratings documentation says include France, Italy, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, Expedia shows that official classification. Everywhere else, Expedia Group assigns the rating itself, and the same documentation notes that star criteria can vary from country to country.

The star rating is one of two numbers travelers see on an Expedia listing. The other is the guest rating, an average of verified guest reviews shown out of 10. Managers often treat them as one thing, and that matters because you move them in completely different ways: stars change when facilities change, and guest scores change when stays get better.

How does the Expedia guest rating work?

The guest rating on a listing is an average of the scores from published reviews, displayed out of 10. Guests rate the overall stay and can also comment on specific aspects like cleanliness, service, amenities, and location, and those category comments shape the impression travelers form even though the headline number is the average.

Expedia's guest reviews documentation explains who writes them: travelers who have recently completed a stay are asked to rate the property and share a written review, which is why these are described as verified guest reviews. That matters for trust: a competitor cannot tank your score with a review for a stay that never happened.

Because the score is an average of however many reviews you have, the fastest lever most small teams control is simply getting more reviews from happy guests, at the right moment. A guest who gets a quick, helpful answer to a pre-arrival question or an in-stay issue is more likely to leave a review at all, and more likely to leave a good one. Timo's AI receptionist handles that guest messaging across WhatsApp, phone, and email, and prompts satisfied guests to review when they are happiest, which is the kind of consistent follow-through that moves a guest score over time.

How do official star ratings compare to guest review scores?

They answer different questions. A star rating, official or Expedia-assigned, describes what a property has. A guest review score describes how the stay felt to the people who had it. A three-star hotel with fast service and spotless rooms can carry a higher guest score than a five-star property with tired rooms and slow replies, and neither number corrects the other.

That has two practical consequences for a hotel manager:

1. You cannot earn stars with service. A higher star class comes from adding or documenting the facilities the classification counts, and in markets with an official authority, from that authority's own process. A strong guest score will not change your star class, so do not spend energy trying to move it with guest-experience fixes.
2. Stars set the expectation that reviews judge. A higher star class raises what guests expect, so the same stay can earn a lower guest score at five stars than it would at three. Do not chase a star class your service cannot back up.

If an Expedia-assigned rating misdescribes your property, raise it with Expedia through Partner Central, with evidence of the facilities you offer. Where an official authority sets the rating, the change starts with that authority, not with Expedia.

Why did Expedia's ratings suddenly look different?

If your scores seem to have shifted with no change in guest experience, the scale changed under you. Expedia Group moved its guest ratings from a 1-5 to a 1-10 scale in late 2023, as the trade outlet Rental Scale-Up reported that December, which aligned it with Booking.com, already on the same 1-10 system.

A score reads differently on a 10-point scale: 4.4 out of 5 sounds close to perfect, while the same ratio shown as 8.8 out of 10 can look merely good. If the number seemed to drop after the changeover, explain the conversion to your team, and to an ownership group, before anyone treats it as a service problem.

What should a hotel manager do to raise the guest rating?

Start with the categories Expedia already asks guests about: cleanliness, service, amenities, and location. Location you cannot change, but you can make sure your listing sets accurate expectations about it, since a mismatch between expectation and reality is a common source of low scores that have nothing to do with the room itself.

A few concrete moves:

1. Respond to every review through Expedia Partner Central, the portal hotels use to manage reviews and listings. A specific, non-defensive reply to a negative review often does more for future bookers than the review itself does damage.
2. Fix repeat complaints first. If three guests in a month mention slow check-in, that is a process problem worth solving before anything else.
3. Make it easy for happy guests to leave a review. Only travelers who completed a stay are asked to review, so the biggest lever is making sure every one of them gets asked at the right time. Expedia Group's guide to hotel guest reviews points partners to the Messages tool in Partner Central, which can send automatic post-stay review requests, and notes that properties with positive guest interactions, including positive reviews, may see higher visibility in search results.
4. Compare against your Booking.com score. Because Booking.com runs on the same 1-10 scale, a gap between your Expedia and Booking.com averages usually points to a channel-specific issue, like a mismatch between what each listing promises. Our guide to Booking.com's 1-10 review scoring covers that system in detail, and our broader piece on how to improve hotel reviews covers tactics that apply across every OTA.

Does responding to reviews change the score?

Responding to reviews does not change the numeric average directly, but it changes what future guests expect and how existing guests behave. A property that visibly replies to complaints tends to see fewer repeat versions of the same complaint, because management demonstrably fixed the issue. For a full walkthrough on tone and timing, see our guide on how to respond to hotel reviews.

The upstream fix is communication during the stay, not after it. Most low scores trace back to something a guest raised in the moment (a late check-in, a maintenance issue, a billing question) that either got answered quickly or did not get answered at all. A property that replies within minutes, on whatever channel the guest already used, resolves more of these before they become a one-star review.

Where Expedia ratings fit in your OTA strategy

Expedia is one channel among several, and treating its guest rating in isolation misses the bigger picture. Compare it against your other platforms, keep an eye on how your star classification appears across listings, and build a simple, repeatable process for requesting reviews after every stay rather than sporadically. Our OTA cheat sheet lays out how the major platforms differ so you are not managing each one from scratch.

Getting more reviews in the first place is often the real bottleneck, more than the rating itself. If most satisfied guests never get asked, no amount of review-response polish will move the average. Our guide on how to encourage guest reviews covers how to build that habit without pestering guests who would rather move on.

A strong Expedia guest score ultimately comes down to consistency: guests who get fast, accurate answers before and during their stay, and a nudge to review when they are happiest. Keeping that communication running around the clock is exactly what an AI receptionist is built for, and it is what turns good stays into the reviews that raise your score.