Hotels Answer 70.2% of Tripadvisor Reviews vs 9.7% for Restaurants

A traveler compares two hotels on Tripadvisor. Under a complaint about a noisy room, one hotel's manager has apologized and explained what was fixed. The other hotel's complaint sits alone. Most travelers read the reviews before they book, and the replies tell them whether anyone at the property is listening.

A management reply is the public answer a business posts under a review. On Tripadvisor it is one of the few things a hotel controls on a page written by its guests. It shows future guests how the property treats a problem, and it turns a single bad stay into evidence of good service.

Hotels have made replying routine. Top-ranked US hotels answer 70.2% of their recent Tripadvisor reviews, and half answer 90% or more. Restaurants in the same 25 cities answer 9.7% and attractions 3.9%. For a restaurant or attraction, that gap is an opening: replying at even a fraction of the hotel rate puts a business well ahead of its local competitors.

On September 23, 2026 we took the top 20 Tripadvisor results for "hotels" in each of 25 large US cities, 510 hotels in all, and analyzed the 50 most recent reviews of each, 25,500 reviews. For every review we recorded the star rating, whether it had a management reply and how many days the reply took. We looked at 398 restaurants and 34 attractions in the same cities the same way, 19,887 and 1,700 reviews respectively.

The reply rate is the share of reviews that carry a management reply. A hotel's own reply rate is the share of its 50 recent reviews it answered, and the median hotel is the one in the middle: half of hotels answer more, half answer less. Reply time is the number of days between the review and the reply.

Replying is standard practice for hotels and rare everywhere else in hospitality. Restaurants in the same 25 cities replied to 9.7% of their recent Tripadvisor reviews, and attractions to 3.9%. A hotel guest reading reviews expects to see the property's answers; a diner reading restaurant reviews almost never does.

The gap reflects how each business earns its money. A hotel booking is planned weeks ahead and compared against several properties on the same page, so a reply can change the decision. Many hotel groups also have a guest relations team whose job includes answering reviews. Restaurants and attractions rarely do, which leaves the owner to find the time.

The median hotel answers 88% of its recent Tripadvisor reviews. 49.8% of hotels answer 90% or more, and 107 of the 510, 21%, answered every one of their last 50 reviews. At the other end, 40 hotels, 7.8%, answered none.

For a hotel, that makes silence the exception that guests notice. A property that answers no reviews stands next to competitors that answer nearly all of theirs, often on the same search results page.

Hotels reply to one-star and five-star reviews at almost the same rate: 68.3% of one-star reviews and 71.1% of five-star reviews. Two-star reviews get 69.1% and three-star 70.3%. Four-star reviews get the fewest replies, at 65.7%.

Most recent reviews of top-ranked hotels are positive: 5-star reviews make up 68.6% of the total, 17,492 of 25,500, while one-star reviews number 2,227. Hotels that reply to everything spend most of their replies thanking happy guests, and the same habit means complaints get answered too.

Among reviews with a reply, the median reply came 2 days after the review. 38.5% of replies arrived within a day and 81% within a week, while 6.5% took more than a month. For a traveler comparing hotels this week, a reply that arrives within days is still visible under the review while they are deciding.

Reply rates vary widely by city. Washington, DC hotels answer 89.2% of recent Tripadvisor reviews, followed by Denver (86.4%), New York (85.2%) and Chicago (84.9%). Las Vegas is the outlier at 27.8%, the lowest of the 25 cities and well below Fort Worth at 49.9%. Several of the most-reviewed casino hotels in Las Vegas answered none of their recent reviews.

For a hotel in a low-reply city, that is an advantage. In Las Vegas, a property that answers its reviews stands out against neighbors that mostly do not.

If you run a hotel, answering reviews is the baseline your competitors already meet: the median top-ranked hotel answers 88% of its reviews within a couple of days. Answer every review, including the four-star ones, and reply to complaints first with a specific fix rather than a template apology.

If you run a restaurant or attraction, the bar is far lower. Your competitors answer about one review in ten, so a steady habit of replying, even to half your reviews, makes your listing look more cared for than almost any other in town. Start with the one- and two-star reviews and the most recent ones, since those are what a diner reads first.

Build replies into a weekly routine with a named owner, and track your reply rate the way you track ratings. Our reputation management services team runs review monitoring and replies for hospitality businesses.

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