Irish tourists among the grumpiest in the world

Irish tourists are the second grumpiest in the world and the ones most likely to leave a negative review of a hotel they have stayed in overseas, according to a report published this morning.

RewardExpert – a service that points people to credit card and travel rewards schemes – has released a ranking of the World's Grumpiest and Happiest Travelers and Ireland has not fared well.

To determine the relative “grumpiness” or “happiness” of a country’s residents, the report used a dataset of nearly 3.5 million online reviews of over 13,000 hotels in 70 countries made by reviewers from 83 different nations.

The hotel reviews were divided into subsets according to the number of stars, on a one- to five-star scale with the subset of one or two-star reviews indicating grumpiness, and the subset of reviews with five-star ratings suggesting pure happiness.

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An average was then calculated of the two numbers in order to rank countries on a scale from grumpy to happy.

Tourists from Ireland were found to be the most likely to leave one and two-star reviews of hotels abroad with 11.97 per cent of 53,429 reviews being one or two stars.

We compensate for this, somewhat, by being relatively free with five-star reviews and glowing assessment made up 41.27 per cent of reviews. Four and three star and ratings among Irish tourists, however were relatively rare.

While Spain may have a reputation for being chilled out, the relaxed manner seems to stop at the country's border and Spaniards abroad are impressively mean-spirited. Not only were they fourth most likely to leave one- and two-star reviews, they were the fifth least likely to leave a five-star review.

The disposition of Icelandic travellers is about as sunny as their home country, with tourists writing grumpy reviews at a rate higher than tourists from all but six other countries and bad reviews making up 11.13 percent of all reviews from Iceland.

According to the report, the three countries with happiest travellers are Russia, Serbia and Lebanon.

Five-star reviews left by Russians made up an impressively high 46.16 per cent of 70,775 reviews examined by RewardExpert. That alone would only have had Russia ranked sixth place but what put Russia over the top was the fact that it ranked last for grumpy, one and two-star reviews, with just4.99 per cent of reviewers rating their stay in an overseas hotel one or two stars.

On just over 7 per cent, Serbians also had a low incidence of one- and two-star reviews while Lebanon finished third, overall with the percentage of reviews in the “happy” subset coming in at 45.69 per cent, while only 7.8 percent of reviews belonged to the “grumpy” subset.

"We can't help making snap judgements about groups of people based on our experiences or stories we've heard," said RewardExpert co-founder Vlad Tyschuk.

“Some people may perceive the French to be lofty, the Germans to be stern, or the Japanese to be meticulous. But setting all subjectivity aside, we wanted to determine which countries’ residents are the most fair or foul natured based on the numbers,” he said.