Seunghun Shin

Exploring the comparative importance of online hotel reviews’ heuristic attributes in review helpfulness: a conjoint analysis approach

ABSTRACT Online travel reviews have become increasingly important as a result of the intangible and heterogeneous characteristics of the tourism industry as well as the recent diffusion of social media. This exploratory case study intends to examine the comparative importance of the six heuristic attributes (reviewer location, reviewer level, reviewer helpful vote, review rating, review length, and review photo) with respect to review helpfulness in the online hotel review context. Moreover, the salience of the individual levels within each review attribute and the importance of the attributes in positive and negative review-rating groups are compared. In total, 1,158 reviews of a hotel on TripAdvisor were collected and analyzed through conjoint analyses. This study found that the review rating and reviewer helpful vote attributes are the two most important factors. Finally, three major propositions are suggested based on findings of the study, and several theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Conceptual foundations of a landmark personality scale based on a destination personality scale: Text mining of online reviews

Landmarks play an important role in representing tourist destinations because they symbolize a destination’s image and personality. Despite the significance of landmarks to the perception of a destination’s image and personality, a personality scale based on landmarks has not been developed. To this end, the purpose of this study is to propose a conceptual foundation of a landscape personality scale based on a destination personality scale using online travel reviews, which are regarded as more valid sources for understanding actual tourist perceptions than simple answers to survey questionnaires. The results of this study imply that the words that describe specific landmarks may differ from those that portray the entire destination and suggest that the words tourists actually use in real situations to characterize tourism resources can be distinguished from hypothetical words of a destination personality scale. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the research and directions for future studies are discussed.

How Far, How Near Psychological Distance Matters in Online Travel Reviews: A Test of Construal-Level Theory

An online travel review is regarded as more important than a general product review due to the tourism product’s intangibleness. This study’s objective is to explore the effect of online travel reviews’ usefulness to the tourist’s perception using the construal-level theory (CLT). For this goal, online travel reviews are divided based on the review content characteristics, and the review usefulness of two different online reviews is compared using the temporal distance. The results show that the near future tourists are more influenced by concrete reviews than abstract reviews; however, the far future tourists are more influenced by abstract reviews than concrete reviews. Based on the results, the theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and future research directions follow based on the limitations.

Analysis of Case Study for Smart Tourism Development: Korea Tourism Organization`s Smart Tourism Case

For tourism, Information Technology (IT) is the one of the most important factors, therefore, tourism has been open to IT. Through internet, the sources of information became extensive. Smartphone and Social Network Service (SNS) make huge changes in tourism. In line with this, Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) is developing the smart tourism system, composed of internet, smartphone, SNS, as representative of Korea tourism. In this research, KTO`s main channels, internet, smartphone, SNS, of smart tourism system will be analyzed as well as the connectivity between the channels.