Markus Schuckert

Hospitality and Tourism Online Reviews: Recent Trends and Future Directions

ABSTRACT In view of the increasing popularity of online reviews and their significant impact on individual buying behavior as well as on the supply side, this study reviewed and analyzed articles related to online reviews in tourism and hospitality published in academic journals between 2004 and 2013. Based on a keyword-driven search and a content analysis, 50 articles were identified as relevant and classified into five topics. The findings revealed that (a) more than half of the analyzed articles focus on hotels and apply empirical methods based on secondary data, (b) more attention has been paid to the relationship between online reviews and online buying as well as satisfaction and online management, and (c) opinion mining of online reviews, motivation to post reviews, and the role of reviews are evenly distributed. This paper also discussed significant topical and methodological trends, contributes to an overall understanding of existing research and its limitation.

Network governance and regional resilience to climate change: empirical evidence from mountain tourism communities in the Swiss Gotthard region

Mountain regions and peripheral communities, which often depend on few economic sectors, are among the most exposed and sensitive to climate change. Governance of such socio-economic-ecological networks plays a strong role in determining their resilience. Social processes of governance, such as collaboration between communities, can be systematically assessed through the existence and strength of connections between actors and their embeddedness in the broader socio-economic network by social network analysis (SNA). This paper examines how network governance of the tourism industry–dependent Swiss Gotthard region relates to resilience to climate change by SNA. The paper argues that economic diversification and a network structure supporting stability, flexibility, and innovation increase regional resilience to climate change. The Gotthard network has a high diversification capability due to high cohesion and close collaboration, limited innovative capacity by the existence of only two subgroups, and considerable flexibility through the centralized structure. Main weaknesses are a low density, uneven distribution of power, and a lack of integration of some supply chain sectors into the overall network.

Insights into Suspicious Online Ratings: Direct Evidence from TripAdvisor

Online ratings and online reputation management are becoming increasingly popular and important. With this increasing importance, attempts to manipulate online reviews through fake reviews have become more prevalent. Suspicious online reviews (ratings) exist on many e-commerce platforms, but these reviews have rarely been observed and reported as manipulation in academic studies using different test methods. In our research, we examine empirical evidence of suspicious online ratings based on 41,572 ratings on TripAdvisor. Applying quantitative analytics, we find three important results: (1) the gap between overall rating and individual ratings does exist and is significant, especially among the lower class hotels; (2) the proportion of suspicious ratings is about 20% at a standard of 0.5; and (3) reviewers who tend to post excellent ratings are less likely to generate big gaps when posting ratings. We offer specific managerial implications for hotel managers on online reputation management and selected suggestions for future research based on the empirical findings.

Can Response Management Benefit Hotels? Evidence from Hong Kong Hotels

ABSTRACT With the growing influence of online reviews, more hotels are adopting online response management, but whether this works and benefits a hotel has rarely been studied. In this research, we study the impact of response management on hotel online ratings using data retrieved from TripAdvisor with a focus on Hong Kong hotels. We find that (1) high class hotels are more likely to adopt response management; (2) there is no significant difference among different hotel classes in terms of response rate; and (3) targeted response management has a significant positive effect on hotel ratings. In addition, Asian customers tend to give lower ratings than Western customers. We outline specific implications for hotel managers and their online management and offer suggestions for future research based on the empirical findings.

Attracting User Social Media Engagement: A Study of Three Budget Airlines Facebook Pages

The role of social media has changed from information delivery to distribution channels. Budget airlines have used their Facebook pages to delivery promotional materials connect new customers, invite user engagement, and information distribution. One of the main purposes of wall posts is to invite user involvement. The results in this study indicated users interested on commenting wall posts which were “fresh”, that means posts published within two days. In order to increase user engagement, airlines should keep publishing new wall posts so as to encourage users to “like” or “share” these information with their network. The company responses were not significant, only five, 14 and 17 responses were found for Air Asia, Easy Jet and Jet Blue respectively. The outcome of the study questions the role and suitability of social media tools for marketing purpose in the airline business especially in relation to other segments within tourism industry.

Online Incentive Hierarchies, Review Extremity, and Review Quality: Empirical Evidence from the Hotel Sector

ABSTRACT Incentive hierarchies are routinely adopted by websites that rely on user-generated content (UGC). They aim to motivate users to contribute by awarding them increasingly higher status on the platform after more and more difficult goals have been achieved. However, whether or not such functionality actually induces high-quality content, and how it changes reviewer behavior, remains unclear. We gather user data from TripAdvisor to answer these questions. The results show that (1) the average quality of the content produced by a reviewer drops as status increases, and (2) reviewers with higher-level badges are less likely to post extreme ratings. In other words, the cumulative effect of “glory-based” incentives appears to be only temporary and decreases as time passes. Our results demonstrate some unanticipated effects of online incentive hierarchies and have important implications for business models inside and outside the hospitality industry that rely on user contributions.

Reviewing Thailand's master plans and policies: implications for creative tourism?

This article contributes to an understanding of how creative tourism is perceived on a national level, by using Thailand as a case analysis. The primary objective of this article is to investigate Thailands plans and policies for the creative economy at both national and ministry levels in relation to creative tourism. It also identifies how a national strategic plan can provide a blueprint for individual agency master plans to provide policy support for the development of the creative economy in the tourism sector. Thailand is chosen as an example of how government and related agencies can contribute to a national creative tourism movement in the country, especially in the light of the Tourism Authority of Thailand branding campaign to stimulate creative tourism to the destination. The qualitative research methodology through content analysis is used to scrutinise the plan and policy contents from the selected government agencies. The results demonstrate a better view of how creative tourism is positioned in the Thailand context and contribute to a policy study on the creative economy in the tourism sector as well as in creative tourism.

Stars, Votes, and Badges: How Online Badges Affect Hotel Reviewers

ABSTRACT As online reviews, ratings, and helpful votes in e-commerce platforms become industry-centric, this study examines how virtual badges affect the online behavior of reviewers and readers based on status-seeking theory in an online environment. This study finds that online readers prefer reviews with low ratings to those with high ratings; however, reviewers with high-level badges tend to post moderate ratings and avoid extreme ratings. Casting doubt on the efficiency of current online incentive systems, user-generated content websites may establish a qualitative index to measure the quality of customer reviews from a long-term perspective to encourage reviewers to continue creating high-quality contents.

Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship Between Type of Travel, Online Ratings, and Management Response: Empirical Evidence from International Upscale Hotels

ABSTRACT The diverse characteristics of customers and hotels have been identified as relevant to online customer satisfaction at the individual level. In this study, a comprehensive examination is conducted, through the use of a multilevel, nested model and secondary data set. The results show that both online review experience and management response frequencies can positively affect customer satisfaction. Additionally, hotel managers need to pay more attention to customers who have less online review experience when they carry out targeted response strategies. The findings have various implications for both academic researchers and hotel operators.

The relevance of mobile tourism and information technology: an analysis of recent trends and future research directions

ABSTRACT Although there have been studies concerning information and communication technologies adoption in the tourism industry, the research trends of mobile tourism (m-tourism) are still not very clear due to the short development time and emerging nature of the technologies. To fill this gap, this study reviewed and analyzed articles related to online reviews of tourism and hospitality published in academic journals between 2002 and 2015. Through a keyword-driven search and content analysis, 92 articles are identified as relevant and classified into three topics. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of this promising research direction by presenting the interesting classification methods used by relevant publications and their insights. This paper also discusses significant topical and methodological trends, and contributes to an overall understanding of existing research and its limitations.