Google has just raised the reviews bar for hotel listings.  Google is testing a new “highly rated” addition to some hotel listings in the search results, which adds the highly rated note along with a thumbs up symbol.

Sergey Alakov spotted the highly rated test and shared these screenshots of it.

The threshold for earning the highly rated notation and the thumbs up symbol seems to be 4.5, meaning your hotel will need to have 4.5 or higher in ratings in order to display it.

It also adds another line of screen real estate for those listings that are 4.5 or higher.  For example, with the Le Germain listing above, you can see it adds lines well beyond the size limit of the thumbail, as it has notations for free wifi and free breakfast already.

If this rolls out, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google roll this beyond hotels.  It seems well suited for restaurants as well.