Consumer Reviews

With the aim of enhancing their online reputation, several hospitality businesses have started soliciting their guests to write online reviews. Available studies have not yet evaluated the effects of this strategy. To fill this knowledge gap, this study draws on the Theory of Psychological Reactance and investigates guests' attitudinal and behavioral reactions to received solicitations. Evidence collected from a sample of Italian travelers indicates that soliciting reviews has both benefits and drawbacks: it increases the number of reviews for the business, but it also irritates a significant share of guests. Particularly high levels of irritation arise when a business explicitly asks its guests to write positive reviews. The implications of these findings for the reputation management strategy of hospitality businesses are discussed.

This paper focuses on the analysis of consumer-generated reviews in travel websites and their use of terminology. The objectives of this paper are first, to study the categories most commonly used in consumer reviews, second, to analyse the use of borrowings and neologisms in consumer reviews and finally, to identify the different words used by reviewers to refer to the same concept and the reason for this variation. In order to reach these objectives, a corpus of two hundred consumer reviews written in Spanish by users of an online platform was compiled. On the one hand, the terms were identified and classified attending to semantic criteria and their level of specialisation. On the other, the borrowings and neologisms were identified in the corpus, being selected and classified in order to study the variation of terms. Then, the results were extracted and discussed and finally, conclusions were drawn.

Hotel booking decisions are increasingly influenced by consumer feedback available on social media sites. Using data submitted by customers on TripAdvisor, this study analyzes the customer satisfaction ratings posted for 2,211 hotels. The study provides four key contributions to our knowledge on this subject. Firstly, a comparative analysis was conducted of customer ratings for hotels located on the Spanish coast and Portugal's southern coast. Secondly, significant differences were found in the number of comments and average online review ratings, which showed a correlation to the tourism destinations' geographical locations. Thirdly, the study found that customers tend to rate their hotel experiences positively. Fourthly, the customers' overall level of satisfaction with a hotel tends to increase proportionately based on the number of customer feedback comments posted for that hotel. Consequently, one of this study's findings is that hotels should encourage their customers to post comments on customer review websites to balance out any negative feedback.

Researchers, marketers, and consumers often believe that amplifying emotional content is impactful for the spread of information and purchasing decisions. However, there is little systematic investigation of when emotionality backfires. This research demonstrates when and why positive emotion can have enhancing versus backfiring effects. The authors find that reviewers who express greater positive emotion are indeed more positive toward their products, regardless of product type. In addition, expressed emotion for hedonic products has a positive impact when read by others, but this emotion backfires for utilitarian products, leading others to be less positive. The authors construct a conceptual model of these effects and show that violated expectations leading to decreased trust underlie this divergence between reviewers and readers. The effects occur in well-controlled experiments as well as computational linguistic analysis of 100,000 Amazon reviews across 500 products. Indeed, emotional reviews of utilitarian products are less likely to become popular and be displayed on the product's front page on Amazon. This work also introduces a novel tool for quantifying natural language in marketing: the Evaluative Lexicon.