Why malls score 4.3 and spas 4.6: a good rating depends on the kind of place

The same stars mean different things

A star rating is not an absolute scale. It is the average of what the people who chose to review a place felt about it, and different kinds of places attract different reviewers with different expectations. A 4.4 park and a 4.4 cocktail bar are not equally good in any useful sense: on our lists, the park sits right at the typical value for parks, while the bar sits below most bars.

The practical consequence is simple. Before deciding whether a rating is good, ask what is normal for that kind of place. The table below gives that baseline for the ten categories we rank.

The benchmark: ten categories side by side

For each category, the table shows how many places on our lists belong to it, the median rating (half the places are above, half below), the share rated 4.5 or more, the share rated 4.8 or more, the median number of reviews, and the share with fewer than 100 reviews.

Big, busy places: malls, parks and landmark sights

Look at the top three rows. Shopping, parks and things to do have the lowest medians and very few places at 4.8 or more: 1% of shopping places, 5% of parks, 8% of sights. They also collect far more reviews: the median shopping place has 5,308, against 339 for a bar.

We can't prove why, but a few explanations are plausible. Many people end up in a mall, a city park or a famous landmark because it is on their way, or because everyone goes there, not because they sought it out as a match for their taste. Research on online product reviews describes a "purchasing bias": the people who buy a product tend to be those already inclined to like it, which pushes averages up. A place visited by almost everyone gets less of that boost. Crowds, queues, parking and toilets also affect the experience of a big public place, and none of them are about what makes it special.

Volume matters too. With thousands of reviews from all sorts of visitors, a rating settles close to the overall mood and very rarely stays at the extremes. A sight with 20,000 reviews and a 4.6 is a very well-liked sight; a mall at 4.5 is roughly in the top fifth of the shopping places on our lists.

Small places cluster high: spas, bars, cafés and restaurants

At the other end, restaurants, cafés, nightlife and spas share a median of 4.6, and between 27% and 32% of them are rated 4.8 or more. Together with temples and churches, they are also the categories with the fewest reviews per place: the median bar has 339 and 26% of bars have fewer than 100.

Again, these are possible explanations, not proven ones. People usually pick a café, a bar or a spa on purpose, often after reading about it, so the purchasing bias described above works in the place's favour. Small businesses can also ask their customers for a review: Google's own business help pages suggest sharing a review link or QR code. Google's rules forbid offering rewards for reviews or asking only satisfied customers, but a place that simply reminds every customer will collect reviews faster than one that never asks. Finally, with a few hundred reviews, one loyal group of regulars can keep an average very high.

The result is that a 4.8 in these categories is common: almost a third of spas on our lists have one. So in these categories the review count deserves a harder look than the stars. A 4.7 bar with 1,500 reviews is a safer bet than a 4.9 bar with 60.

The middle group: hotels, museums, temples and churches

Hotels, museums, temples and churches all have a median of 4.5, but they differ at the top. Hotels and museums rarely reach 4.8 (10% and 11%), which makes a 4.8 hotel with over a thousand reviews genuinely uncommon. Temples and churches reach 4.8 more often (19%), but 19% of them also have fewer than 100 reviews: many are probably small shrines or neighbourhood churches with a handful of devoted reviewers.

Country matters as well as category. Japan accounts for 3,834 of the 9,778 places on our lists and has a median of 4.4, while Brazil's median is 4.7. A 4.5 in Tokyo and a 4.5 in Rio are not the same signal either, so when you can, compare a place with others of the same kind in the same city.

Quick reference: what counts as excellent

These rules of thumb come straight from the table above. They are starting points, not verdicts, and they apply to places that already appear on lists like ours.

• Find the category's typical rating first, then judge the place against it, not against 5.0.
• In malls, parks and big sights, a rating at or a little above typical is already a good sign.
• In cafés, bars, restaurants and spas, anything under 4.5 is below most of their peers on our lists.
• Where 4.8 is common, let the review count break the tie.
• Compare within one city where possible: across the 21 countries on our lists, the median by country ranges from 4.4 to 4.7.

How our lists handle these differences

Our city lists are sorted by number of reviews by default, a figure anyone can check on each card. The "Best" sort uses a Bayesian score that pulls every rating toward 4.0 until a place has a few hundred reviews (the weight is 300), then adds a bonus for review volume, on a logarithmic scale (about 0.54 for 500 reviews, 0.74 for 5,000), and a small one, at most 0.15, for recent activity. The same formula applies to every category; we do not adjust it per type of place.

That has consequences worth knowing. A typical spa (4.6 from 514 reviews) gets a Bayesian score of 4.38, and a typical mall (4.3 from 5,308) gets 4.28. Once the volume bonus is added, the mall pulls slightly ahead (5.03 against 4.92, before the recent-activity term). So in a list that mixes categories, neither the high-star categories nor the crowded ones win automatically. The fairest reading is still within one category: compare a spa with other spas and a mall with other malls.

The "Hidden gems" sort only considers places with 40 to 2,500 reviews and rewards a high rating. At least half of the shopping places on our lists are above that range (median 5,308 reviews), so malls rarely qualify, while the typical café, bar or spa falls well inside it. That is where a high rating with modest numbers is useful, as long as you read it with this article's benchmarks in mind.