The World Cup is a global phenomenon that captures our attention every four years, to the point where we look to animals masquerading as oracles for matchup predictions.

We wanted to make use of the context and global presence that TripAdvisor shared with the 2014 FIFA World Cup – and demonstrate the power of TripAdvisor’s reviews to travelers all over the world.

If clairvoyant animals can make accurate predictions based on their latent psychic abilities, why can’t we make predictions based on data that actually matters?

We saw an opportunity to throw our name into the ring and become the first oracle that based their predictions on the quality of accommodations the football team experienced the night before they played.

We all knew hotel accommodations were important, but were they important enough to influence the outcome of the 2014 FIFA World Cup?

At the core of our “Hotel Cup” idea is that TripAdvisor has the power to enable travelers to plan and book the perfect trip – even if the travelers are world class national football teams trying to make history.

By using quantitative and qualitative data like a typical traveler would, we exposed a new global audience to the wealth of information available on TripAdvisor and the fact that TripAdvisors effort resulted in 93% accuracy reaffirmed that TripAdvisor is the most comprehensive travel review site in the world.

And here's just a sampling of what a few people said. Please see our supporting documents for additional information.

Pretty cool idea from #TripAdvisor #HotelCup

Is the game swayed by where the team stays?

The fact that @TripAdvisor predictions via #HotelCup

have been acurate. Astounding. Truly astounding.

Don’t watch much soccer, but the @TripAdvisor #HotelCup

is pretty interesting! Check out the bracket: bit.ly/1NWblb

Whats better than animals predicting the @FIFAWorld Cup

Analyse what hotels teams are staying in: bit.ly/1rGsWNO

We thought it would be interesting to predict World Cup matchup results based on the quality of accommodations football teams experienced the night before they played – and what better resource is there to research and find relevant hotel data than TripAdvisor.com?

Using millions of traveler reviews on the site, predictions were formulated by the host of data found on the TripAdvisor site.

The power of TripAdvisor’s data comes from its community and their user submitted reviews. Knowing TripAdvisor is the largest and most comprehensive travel review site in the world, we simply set out to demonstrate its ability to help travelers plan and book the perfect trip, even if the trip consists of trying to make football history.

For “Hotel Cup”, we only used the available review and hotel data on the TripAdvisor site. We didn’t want to use anything that consumers didn’t have access to. We wanted to demonstrate the power of the data that travelers from all over the world could use to shape their own travel planning decisions.

Our algorithm to predict which team moved on to the next round consisted of two inputs:

INPUT 1 – “Popularity Index”

TripAdvisor’s “Popularity Index” is a percentage rating roughly calculated by adding up the number of four and five star reviews, and looking at those as a percentage of total reviews. The index is weighted by the number of reviews and other factors such as amenities and number of searches that the hotel has captured.

INPUT 2 – Qualitative Data

The Popularity Index was a big part of our algorithm / prediction – but just as traveler’s don’t make their decisions solely on cold hard numbers – we weren’t going to make our predictions by just relying on TripAdvisor’s quantitative “Popularity Index”.

For our second input, we factored in qualitative data because we knew that travelers made their booking choices the same way.

Using recent hotel data and relevant community reviews from a month prior to the 2014 World Cup , we accounted for things football players would care about most in their accommodations. Things that can’t be assigned a number: amenities, service, sleep quality, location relative to where the game was, gym equipment, cleanliness – anything football players would want or need most the night before a match.