The impact of online reviews on hotel booking intentions and perception of trust.

By B. Sparks, Victoria Browning. 2011

1,621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing reliance on the Internet as an information source when making choices about tourism products raises the need for more research into electronic word of mouth. Within a hotel context, this study explores the role of four key factors that influence perceptions of trust and consumer choice. An experimental design is used to investigate four independent variables: the target of the review (core or interpersonal); overall valence of a set of reviews (positive or negative); framing of reviews (what comes first: negative or positive information); and whether or not a consumer generated numerical rating is provided together with the written text. Consumers seem to be more influenced by early negative information, especially when the overall set of reviews is negative. However, positively framed information together with numerical rating details increases both booking intentions and consumer trust. The results suggest that consumers tend to rely on easy-to-process information, when evaluating a hotel based upon reviews. Higher levels of trust are also evident when a positively framed set of reviews focused on interpersonal service.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bce7958a9c5db7dcd749c00514a5a62bb3966087

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Citations in the corpus

Hospitality and Tourism Online Reviews: Recent Trends and Future Directions (2015, neutral): “The results show a positive correlation between hotel purchasing intention and the valence of reviews (Mauri & Minazzi, 2013; Sparks & Browning, 2011).”
Predicting overall customer satisfaction: Big data evidence from hotel online textual reviews (2019, background): “The impacts of online reviews are mainly disseminated through the generated eWOM and include influencing future customers’ purchase intentions, trust, customer demand, and hotels’ financial performance (Sparks and Browning, 2011; Vermeulen and Seegers, 2009).”
The effect of electronic word of mouth communication on purchase intention and brand image: An applicant smartphone brands in North Cyprus (2019, background): “Given the ease of access to the Internet, it provides many opportunities to consumers who rely on eWOM to generate information from other consumers to form opinions about goods and services (Sparks & Browning, 2011; Zhao & Xie, 2011).”
Putting the “self” in selfies: how narcissism, envy and self-promotion motivate sharing of travel photos through social media (2020, neutral): “Consumers rely on content from other travellers for awareness and decision-making (Casalo, Flavian, Guinaliu, & Ekinci, 2015; Litvin, Goldsmith, & Pan, 2008; O’Connor, 2008; Sparks & Browning, 2011; Tussyadiah & Fesenmaier, 2008).”
Analysis of satisfiers and dissatisfiers in online hotel reviews on social media (2016, background): “such content as a resource for decision making and collaborative platform for experience sharing (Pantelidis, 2010; Sparks and Browning, 2011).”
Effects of the Booking.com rating system: Bringing hotel class into the picture (2018, positive): “, 2011) and on the impacts of eWOM from a consumer perspective (e.g., Wen, 2009; Sparks and Browning, 2011) and a company perspective (e.”
User-generated-content versus marketing-generated-content: personality and content influence on traveler’s behavior (2018, background): “Sparks and Browning (2011) strongly support that when consumers are facing product decisions, they rely more on online search,”
Credibility of online reviews and initial trust (2012, background): “Given the very intangible and experiential nature of travel-related services to a prospective traveller who has never been to a travel destination previously, it is reasonable that travellers are absorbing the information provided by other travellers through the online review (Sparks and Browning, 2”
Tourists’ willingness to pay for an accommodation: the effect of eWOM and internal reference price (2017, background): “Studies have investigated several topics including booking intentions (Ladhari & Michaud, 2015; Mauri & Minazzi, 2013; Miao et al., 2011; Sparks & Browning, 2011), hotel choice (Noone & McGuire, 2013b; Vermeulen & Seegers, 2009; Viglia, Furlan, & Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2014) and even the trade-off…”