Hotel complaints: what guests complain about most in luxury hotel reviews

In hotel reviews guests complain about two things above all: the service, which draws the largest number of complaints, and the price, the one subject on which criticism outweighs praise. We measured it between 1 and 8 October 2026 on the 277 hotels in our hotel guide: Maldives resorts, grand city hotels, American and Italian resorts. For 251 of them we read a price: the cheapest night for two has a median of €635.

We wanted to know what a guest talks about when they write, and in what tone. For each hotel we took the latest 500 Google reviews with written text, or all of them where there were fewer: 105,887 in total, the most recent dated 7 October 2026. An AI model read them one at a time and put six closed questions to each: does the guest talk about the location, the room, the staff, the facilities, breakfast, the price? And in what tone, from very negative to very positive? The tone becomes a number from 0 to 10, and the average of those numbers is the hotel’s score. Staff and facilities are merged into one score, services.

Four of the five scores sit between 7.48 and 8.63. The fifth, which the guide calls “the bill” and which says whether the stay was worth what it cost, extras included, is only 4.49. It is below 5 at 185 of the 277 hotels and it is the lowest of the five at 276 of 277: the best has 6.8, the worst 2.2.

The most common hotel complaint is about staff and service; price comes a close second, and it is by far the most likely complaint among guests who raise the subject at all. To count them we reopened the readings one by one for 273 of the 277 hotels: 104,237 reviews.

Staff are mentioned in 69,867 reviews, and 6,073 of those speak badly of them: fewer than one in ten. Price is mentioned in 12,676 reviews, and 5,427 of those are complaints, against 4,904 from satisfied guests. Guests who mention the location are happy 90% of the time and unhappy 3%; guests who mention the price are happy 39% of the time and unhappy 43%.

The order holds in the 7,020 reviews that gave one or two stars: 4,504 criticise the staff, 2,805 the price, 1,816 the facilities, 1,228 the room. One review in eight, then, brings up the price, and more often to criticise it than to praise it.

Outside the Maldives the score for the bill is lower than in the Maldives, so the result holds. The question has to be asked, because our sample leans one way: 175 of the 277 hotels are Maldives resorts, the country our guide covers most thoroughly.

At the 102 hotels outside the Maldives the bill scores 3.98 and is below 5 at 88. Guests in the Maldives are more generous on the rest as well: they give services 8.65 against 7.79 elsewhere, and the room 8.04 against 7.69. With 6 or 8 hotels in a country, read the direction: the decimal can move with one more hotel.

We also have a cross-check. For every hotel in the guide we chose up to five hotels a traveller would weigh against it, in the same place and the same class, and read them the same way: 359 more hotels, 146,538 reviews. Their bill scores 4.14 and is below 5 at 294 of 359. Added to ours that makes 636 hotels and 252,425 reviews, and the picture stays the same.

Price complaints do not show in the star average because they often sit inside four-star and five-star reviews. Google explains that a profile’s review score is the average of all ratings published for the place, from 1 to 5 stars. At our 273 hotels, 87,075 of the 104,237 reviews gave five stars and the average is 4.62.

Of the 5,427 reviews unhappy about the price, 1,519 gave four or five stars. For staff the figure is 746 of 6,073. A guest who found everything wonderful and the bar overpriced leaves five stars and one criticism, and the average records the stars alone.

The same happens on other platforms. On Booking.com a guest can give a separate mark for value for money, one of six optional categories which, as Booking tells its partners, do not count towards the overall score. In August 2026 we collected 4,346 reviews of four Swiss grand hotels on Booking and Tripadvisor, and read the category scores the two platforms calculate. On Booking the best category ran from 9.59 to 9.89 and value for money from 8.41 to 8.97; on Tripadvisor value was the lowest score at all four. At one of them, 98 of 317 Booking reviews contained a criticism: 7 named the price and the extras, from parking to laundry, and those seven guests had given an average of 8.8 out of 10.

When guests complain about price, six in ten also describe something else that went wrong and measure it against the rate they paid. In 3,330 of the 5,427 reviews the criticism of the price sits beside another criticism; the other 2,097 criticise the price alone.

They are long reviews: a median of 106 words, against 30 for any review, and 1,551 of them quote a sum of money. Read them and four situations keep coming back.

The three word counts, 460, 458 and 404, come from searches in several languages: treat them as an order of magnitude. One caution applies to every figure here: people who never slept at the hotel also write on Google, and some of these reviews come from the bar, the restaurant or the spa.

More expensive hotels do not get more complaints about price: in our data the score for the bill stays flat as the rate rises, and follows the score for services instead. For 251 hotels we hold the cheapest night for two, read between 26 September and 8 October 2026 and converted to euros at the European Central Bank’s rate of 30 September.

Of the 67 hotels with at least 9 for services, 46 have the bill at 5 or above; of the 16 below 7, none does. The same pattern shows among the Maldives resorts and among the other hotels. It is a link between two scores drawn from the same reviews at one moment: alone, it does not prove that better service raises the score for the bill.

An example from public data: the 208 Google reviews of Aman New York that carry a text, read by 1 October 2026. The location comes up in 42 reviews, and 79% are happy with it; the room in 66, with 79%; services in 137, with 72%. The price comes up in 38 reviews: 26% are happy, 66% unhappy. The cheapest night we read, on 28 September, cost $2,650. At the five New York hotels a traveller would weigh against it, between 17% and 35% of the reviews that talk about the price are happy: The St. Regis 17% of 103 reviews, The Ritz-Carlton Central Park 18% of 34, The Carlyle 23% of 62, Park Hyatt 25% of 88, The Peninsula 35% of 55. A hotel’s figure therefore has to be read beside its competitors’. At the other end stands Giraffe Manor, in Kenya, which has the highest score for the bill of the 277: the price comes up in 66 reviews, and 76% are happy. In 16 of its 500 Google reviews, read on 1 October 2026, the same phrase returns, expensive but worth every penny.

Price complaints call for two things: find out what went wrong during the stay of the guest who complains, and publish everything the guest will pay before they book. In our data a lower rate does not bring a better score.

On unannounced costs, two countries also have a rule. In the United States, since 12 May 2025 the Federal Trade Commission’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees has required anyone advertising lodging to show the total price up front. The example in the agency’s own questions and answers is a resort at $199 a night with a mandatory resort fee of $39 a day, which must be included in the total. In the United Kingdom, the Competition and Markets Authority’s guidance on price transparency, published on 18 November 2025, calls it illegal to hide until later in the purchase any fees, taxes or charges the customer will have to pay.

The total you publish then has to match what the guest saw elsewhere before booking: in 117 of the 156 Google Hotels listings we read between 21 September and 8 October 2026 another seller showed a lower price than the hotel’s own site, as we describe in who sells your hotel for less than your own site. We counted how much hotels really write on their own sites in our article on how much the world’s best hotels publish.

You respond to a complaint about price in public and with facts: the sum the guest paid, what it covered, what has changed since. Google explains that your reply is posted under the review in the name of the business, that the guest is notified and that they can edit what they wrote.

At the 209 hotels in the sample that reply regularly, meaning at least 10 replies among the reviews we read, management answered 58,790 of 81,967 reviews, or 72%. It answered reviews unhappy about the price 2,547 times in 3,903, or 65%. Reply to the five-star reviews that mention the price as well: those are the ones the average hides.

The reply serves the guest and whoever reads after them. For machines, one study suggests, it counts for less: in June 2026 three researchers asked twelve AI models to choose among five hotels whose features were assigned at random. A top guest rating raised the chance of being recommended by 31.6 percentage points, a high price lowered it by 30.0, and management responses were ignored.

Reviews matter to both Google and ChatGPT. Google writes that more reviews and positive ratings can help a business’s local ranking. Assistants read them even when nobody asks: on 27 September 2026, in our conversations about spa hotels, they went looking for reviews unprompted for 39 of 46 hotels, as we describe in the guide on how to get your hotel on ChatGPT and Gemini.

In our study of hotels in the answers of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, from August 2026, we followed two conversations past the first answer: in one, a hotel dropped out of the itinerary after the guest asked the assistant to recalculate the route and read recent reviews. Our app for ChatGPT and Claude also answers travellers who ask what guests say about a hotel. What a guest writes about your bill, then, will also be read by the machine that draws up the shortlist.

A score out of 10 is worked out from the text in five steps: choose the reviews, put the same closed questions to each, turn the tone into a number, take the average, and correct it where the reviews are few.

The measure has limits. The correction for small numbers lowers the bill: without it the average would be 4.84 in place of 4.49, the score would be below 5 at 152 of the 277 hotels and would remain the lowest at 267. It reads Google alone, where people who dropped in for a drink also write. It mixes different years: 59,765 of the 104,237 reviews were written from January 2025 onwards, the rest before. It covers the 277 hotels in our guide, which are no sample of all the world’s luxury hotels. The model can misread a single review, and the measure counts what guests write: no stay was verified. Last, the score for the bill measures the guests who talk about price, one review in eight: 4.49 tells you what people write when they raise the subject, and nothing about the guests who stayed silent.

Reading your own hotel’s reviews takes an hour, a spreadsheet and the latest 100 reviews with a text. They tell you whether price is a problem of rate, of service or of information.

Repeat the count every three months with the new reviews. If a competitor of yours is in the guide, the count is already done: its page sets out in words the five things that matter to guests, from the location to the bill, and the figures are at the end of that section, under “The numbers, and how we count them”.