Hotel and Restaurant Review Aggregator for the GCC
A review aggregator collects the same property's ratings from every platform that reviews it and merges them into one score. It exists because a hotel rated 4.7 on Google and 3.9 on TripAdvisor doesn't have two truths, it has two audiences — and reading either number alone gives you a partial answer. ReviewsMerger is a hotel and restaurant review aggregator built specifically for the GCC, merging Google, TripAdvisor and Booking.com into a single Trust Rating and a Current Pulse trend score per property.
What This Aggregator Currently Covers
Queried live from the database, counting only published properties with a computed score — the ones a visitor can actually open. Right now that's 2,512 hotels and 3,637 restaurants across 11 cities, built from 21,373,469 aggregated reviews.
| Platform | Properties covered | Reviews aggregated |
|---|---|---|
| 6,111 | 15,269,103 | |
| TripAdvisor | 2,335 | 2,181,171 |
| Booking.com | 1,768 | 3,923,183 |
| Zomato | 5 | 8 |
| Agoda | 2 | 4 |
How Ratings From Three Platforms Become One Score
Three steps, all of them published rather than proprietary. First, normalization: Google and TripAdvisor publish out of 5 and are multiplied by 20; Booking.com publishes out of 10 and is multiplied by 10, so everything lands on the same 0-100 scale before anything is combined. Second, weighting by category — hotels are Google 40%, Booking.com 30%, TripAdvisor 30%; restaurants are Google 40%, TripAdvisor 60%, because Booking.com lists accommodation only and has no restaurant score to contribute. Third, a Bayesian average with a prior of 50 reviews at a 72/100 mean, so a property with four glowing reviews doesn't outrank one with four hundred consistent ones. The full derivation is on the methodology page, and a shorter walkthrough on how the Trust Rating is calculated.
Why Hotel and Restaurant Aggregation Aren't the Same Problem
A single formula applied to both categories would be wrong in one of them. Booking.com only reviews places you can sleep in, so a restaurant has at most two of the three sources, and in much of the GCC it has one. Hotels also carry far more cross-platform review volume, which means their aggregated score stabilizes faster and the Bayesian prior stops mattering sooner. Restaurants need the opposite treatment: fewer sources, thinner volume, more weight on the prior until the review count catches up.
Where the Coverage Is Thin — and Why We Say So
Of 6,149 published properties, 3,230 have two or more platforms merged and 2,919 (47%) currently have only one. A single-platform property is almost always a Google-only restaurant outside Dubai and Abu Dhabi that hasn't been matched to a TripAdvisor listing yet. Its Trust Rating is still computed the same way and is still normalized and Bayesian-adjusted, but it is not a cross-platform consensus, and calling it one would be the exact failure this site exists to correct. Where platforms do disagree, the gaps are worth reading directly: see why ratings differ across platforms for a live leaderboard of the widest ones we track.
See the Aggregated Scores
Browse the best-rated hotels across the GCC or the top-reviewed restaurants, both ranked by aggregated Trust Rating, or put any two properties side by side with the Compare tool to see each platform's contribution separately. The underlying coverage figures on this page are also available as JSON at /api/public/aggregator-coverage.
FAQ
What is a hotel review aggregator?
A hotel review aggregator collects a property's ratings from multiple review platforms and combines them into a single score, instead of leaving you to compare Google, TripAdvisor and Booking.com tab by tab. ReviewsMerger currently aggregates 2,512 hotels and 3,637 restaurants across 11 cities in the GCC, merging 21,373,469 reviews into one Trust Rating per property.
How is a restaurant review aggregator different from a hotel one?
The platform mix differs, so the weighting has to. Booking.com lists accommodation only, so it contributes nothing to a restaurant score — ReviewsMerger weights hotels Google 40%, Booking.com 30%, TripAdvisor 30%, and restaurants Google 40%, TripAdvisor 60%. An aggregator that applied one formula to both would either ignore Booking.com for hotels or invent a Booking.com score for restaurants.
How do you combine ratings that use different scales?
Every platform is normalized to the same 0-100 scale before anything is averaged. Google and TripAdvisor publish out of 5, so their score is multiplied by 20; Booking.com publishes out of 10 and is multiplied by 10. Only after that are the category weights applied.
Does a property with few reviews get an unfairly high score?
No — the Trust Rating is a Bayesian average, not a raw one. A property's own average is pulled toward the dataset mean in proportion to how few reviews it has, so a single 5.0 review can't outrank a property with hundreds of consistent reviews. The prior weight is 50 reviews against a 72/100 mean.
Do all properties have every platform aggregated?
No, and the page states the real figure rather than the ideal one: 3,230 of 6,149 published properties currently have two or more platforms merged, and 2,919 (47%) have only one. Coverage is deepest for hotels and for Dubai and Abu Dhabi restaurants; single-platform properties are usually Google-only listings still awaiting a TripAdvisor match.
How often is the aggregated data refreshed?
Ratings and review counts are re-synced on a rolling schedule per platform, and every score on the site is computed from the current stored aggregates rather than a periodic snapshot. The coverage figures on this page are queried live from the database on each page load.