What Is a Booking.com Review Score?
The Booking.com review score is the overall Guest Review Score, from 1 to 10, that Booking.com shows for a property, built from the overall scores guests who booked gave over the last three years and, since January 2025, weighted so the most recent reviews count the most (Everything you need to know about Guest Review Scores (Booking.com for Partners)).
Last updated: November 2026
How the Booking.com review score is calculated
Once a guest checks out, Booking.com emails a review request, and the guest has 90 days to respond. The only required question is an overall score from 1 to 10 for the stay (Everything you need to know about Guest Review Scores (Booking.com for Partners)). The only way to leave a review is to make a booking first (Review guidelines (Booking.com)).
The property's score combines those overall scores from the last three years. Until January 2025 it was a plain average of every review in that window. Since then, Booking.com has used a weighted calculation in which a review's importance falls as it ages, so the newest review has the biggest effect on the score (Everything you need to know about Guest Review Scores (Booking.com for Partners)).
The exact weights are not public. Recency is one of several parameters, and Booking.com keeps some details undisclosed to prevent gaming (Booking.com's new review scoring: What it means for hotels (Shiji via Hospitality Net, Dec 2024)).
The guest-facing review guidelines describe the weighted system but also keep an older sentence describing the score as all review scores added up and divided by their number (Review guidelines (Booking.com)). The partner help page, last modified in January 2026, is the better guide to the current method (Everything you need to know about Guest Review Scores (Booking.com for Partners)).
Why it matters for hotel distribution
The score runs at a very large scale. Booking.com's 2026 review awards went to about 1.81 million partners, a count that includes car rental and airport transfer suppliers, and drew on more than 370 million verified reviews (Traveller Review Awards 2026 celebrate 1.81 million partners worldwide (Hospitality Net)). The 2026 award score used reviews published between December 1, 2022 and November 30, 2025 (Traveller Review Awards (Booking.com)).
Reputation scores in general track revenue. A 1% rise in a hotel's online reputation score was linked to up to 0.89% higher price, 0.54% higher occupancy and 1.42% higher RevPAR (The Impact of Social Media on Lodging Performance (Cornell Center for Hospitality Research, 2012)). The 2012 Cornell study used a cross-channel reputation index, so it describes guest reputation across sites in general and gives no figure for the Booking.com score on its own.
For a hotel or rental operator, a stay where the room, rate or dates did not match the booking now weighs on the score quickly.
The Booking.com rating system compared with earlier versions
The scale and the method have both changed. In practice, the older Booking.com rating system ran from 2.5 to 10, which pushed scores toward the top, while people assumed a scale starting at 0 or 1 (Booking.com: The unexpected scoring system (Mellinas et al., Tourism Management, 2015)). Compared with Priceline, those scores showed significant distortions, mostly for hotels with low and medium scores (Effects of the Booking.com scoring system (Mellinas et al., Tourism Management, 2016)).
| Older system (studied 2015 to 2016) | Before January 2025 | Since January 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | 2.5 to 10 in practice | Not stated in the sources used here | 1 to 10 |
| How reviews combine | Not described in the studies used here | Plain average of three years of reviews | Weighted toward recent reviews within three years |
| Where it is documented | Peer-reviewed research | Booking.com partner help page | Booking.com partner help page |
Table sources: Booking.com: The unexpected scoring system (Mellinas et al., Tourism Management, 2015) Effects of the Booking.com scoring system (Mellinas et al., Tourism Management, 2016) Everything you need to know about Guest Review Scores (Booking.com for Partners)
Frequently asked questions
When does a new property get a review score?
How long does a guest review count toward the score?
Do cleanliness, location and other category ratings change the overall score?
Can a guest who never stayed leave a review?
Does Booking.com set or adjust a property's score?
Related terms
See all termsWhere Jetstream fits
A review score reflects the stay a guest actually had, and that stay starts with a booking that matched the room, rate and dates the guest saw. Jetstream builds an AI channel manager that connects a property's systems to the channels where guests book and keeps rooms, rates and availability accurate on every one of them, managed from one place.