Who reviews here

One number we work out ourselves, and the only one on this site. It is not a score, and it does not rank anything.

The question

Every restaurant here carries two ratings, from Google and from TripAdvisor, and they almost always agree. Across the 138 Hoi An restaurants with enough reviews on both, the two scores differ by less than a fifth of a star four times out of five. Ratings are not where the interesting difference is.

Where the reviews land is a different matter. TripAdvisor is where visitors write a trip up. Google is where everyone does — residents, expats, Vietnamese travellers on holiday, and visitors too. In a town that receives several million visitors a year against a population of about 120,000, the gap between those two audiences is the most useful thing the data knows.

The number

For each restaurant we divide its TripAdvisor review count by its Google review count. That is the whole calculation. Cargo Club has roughly two and a half TripAdvisor reviews for every Google one; QQ Restaurant has one for every thirty-eight. Across Hoi An it runs from one TripAdvisor review per 38 Google ones at the quiet end, to 8 the other way — with a typical restaurant sitting at about two TripAdvisor reviews for every three on Google. That is why the bands below straddle 0.89 rather than 1: in this town, collecting more Google reviews than TripAdvisor ones is the normal condition, not a distinction.

The bands

Cut into thirds, measured once on the August 2026 snapshot and then held still, so a restaurant's band does not move unless the restaurant does.

Band	TripAdvisor reviews per Google review	Restaurants
On the tourist trail	more than 0.89	46
Both rooms	0.45 to 0.89	46
Off the tourist trail	fewer than 0.45	46
Not enough reviews	under 100 on either platform, or missing from one of them entirely	65

A restaurant needs at least 100 reviews on both platforms before we will put a band on it. Below that the ratio is noise: five Google reviews against four hundred on TripAdvisor says more about who has walked past with a phone than about who eats there.

What it is not

It is not a quality score. "Off the tourist trail" is not praise and "on the tourist trail" is not an insult — some of the best food in Hoi An is on the trail, and some of the worst is off it. There is still no leaderboard here and no number one.

It is also not a claim about who eats somewhere. It is a claim about who writes it up, which is a narrower and more honest thing to measure. A place full of Vietnamese families at lunch and Australians at dinner will look like whichever group reaches for their phone afterwards.

The thing we tried first, and dropped

The obvious version of this is to subtract one rating from the other and call a gap meaningful. We worked it out and it does not survive contact with the data. Across the 138 qualifying restaurants the difference runs from −0.4 to +0.6 stars, four in five sit within a fifth of a star of each other, and because both platforms round to one decimal place there are only ten distinct values in the whole set. Most of what is left is a platform-wide habit — TripAdvisor runs about 0.06 stars higher than Google here, on everything.

Worse, it points the wrong way. The two biggest negative gaps in Hoi An belong to Secret Garden and Mango Rooms, both squarely on the visitor trail. They look like local favourites only because TripAdvisor's visitors mark them down. We would have published the opposite of the truth, so we did not publish it.

Check it yourself

Both review counts for every restaurant are in the open dataset, under CC BY 4.0. The calculation is one division. If you get a different answer, tell us.