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Is TripAdvisor still relevant? The influence of review credibility, review usefulness, and ease of use on consumers’ continuance intention
Abstract
Purpose
Recent figures show that users are discontinuing their usage of TripAdvisor, the leading user-generated content (UGC) platform in the tourism sector. Hence, it is relevant to study the factors that influence travelers’ continued use of TripAdvisor.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors have integrated constructs from the technology acceptance model, information systems (IS) continuance model and electronic word of mouth literature. They used PLS-SEM (smartPLS V.3.2.8) to test the hypotheses using data from 297 users of TripAdvisor recruited through Prolific.
Findings
Findings reveal that perceived ease of use, online consumer review (OCR) credibility and OCR usefulness have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, which ultimately leads to continuance intention of UGC platforms. Customer satisfaction mediates the effect of the independent variables on continuance intention.
Practical implications
Managers of UGC platforms (i.e. TripAdvisor) can benefit from the findings of this study. Specifically, they should improve the ease of use of their platforms by facilitating travelers’ information searches. Moreover, they should use signals to make credible and helpful content stand out from the crowd of reviews.
Originality/value
This is the first study that adopts the IS continuance model in the travel and tourism literature to research the factors influencing consumers’ continued use of travel-based UGC platforms. Moreover, the authors have extended this model by including new constructs that are particularly relevant to UGC platforms, such as performance heuristics and OCR credibility.
... It has become a ritual to consult online content before purchasing (Filieri et al., 2020). Young consumers (ages 18-34) significantly rely on online reviews, placing a level of trust comparable to friends' recommendations when making purchasing decisions (Kaemingk, 2020). ...
... Researchers have also found positive effects of UGC on tourists' behavioral intentions within diverse tourist groups, including Iranian tourists (Balouchi et al., 2017) and international tourists visiting Malaysia (Asyraff et al., 2023). Scholars have expanded upon this by examining users' adoption intentions of UGC using the technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis, 1989), incorporating factors such as perceived enjoyment, source credibility, risk perception, performance heuristics, and social media marketing (Balouchi et al., 2017;Deb et al., 2022;Filieri et al., 2020), trustworthiness and expertise (Assaker, 2019). Although UGC is relied upon heavily for decision-making, comprehensive studies on factors such as PNC, PRC, and PVC need further investigation for a deeper understanding of their influence on tourists' perceptions of destination image and subsequent behavioral intentions. ...
... Tourists often document their impressions of destinations online that are accessible to others (Chen et al., 2014). UGC, which reflects personal experiences and opinions, significantly impacts users and often contrasts traditional marketing efforts (Filieri et al., 2020). Due to its unique and personalized perspectives, UGC tends to enhance its reliability (Assaker, 2019). ...
Online review reading is almost ritualistic before making any purchases. Building on social cognition theory, uses and gratification theory, and stimulus organism response theory, this study explores user-generated content (UGC) attributes affecting intentions to travel via a mediating variable (destination image). Using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis and necessary conditions analysis (NCA) on responses ( N = 392) collected online in India, the findings reveal that the perceived novelty of content (PNC) and perceived value of content (PVC) positively influence destination image and behavioral intention. Destination image mediates the relationship between PNC, PVC, and content users’ behavioral intentions. Perceived reliability of content (PRC) positively affects behavioral intention. The findings suggest that adequate PNC, PRC, and PVC levels are necessary to enhance destination image and generate intention to travel. This study contributes to the UGC literature and provides recommendations for stakeholders to improve user experience and enhance destination image perception.
... When someone goes on a trip by choosing a certain mode of transportation, they perceive the enjoyment based on their experiences during the trip (J. Choe et al., 2017;Filieri et al., 2021). It is predicted that the pleasure felt by this individual will lead to other activities, such as sharing it on social media (Bilgihan et al., 2016; J. (Jamie) Li et al., 2022). ...
... Providing reviews is crucial as it can act as a source of information to reduce risk in tourist decision making (Chakraborty, 2019). In general, a review cannot be done objectively if individual have not bought or tried the experience (Filieri et al., 2021). Honest feedback from customers who have experienced a service can be used as an assessment before a decision is made. ...
... Chakraborty (2019) stated that in the context of online business, review credibility is one of the important antecedents that can determine an individual's perception. Thus, readers who consider the reviews to be credible will be more confident and use them as a reference for their subsequent attitudes or behavior (Cheung et al., 2009;Filieri et al., 2021). On the one hand, if a review is deemed less credible, its effect will be negligible as readers may try to avoid it. ...
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to understand what influences tourists’ travel experience sharing and intention to re-staycation. S-O-R framework is used to examine how social influence affects perceived enjoyment, while subsequently sharing their staycation experience and intention to re-staycation. Design/methodology/approach – 325 generation Z millennials who have experienced staycation and share it to their social media are chosen using purposive sampling. The data obtained is processed using Structural Equation Modeling with AMOS.Findings – The findings of this study indicate that social influence affects tourists’ perceived enjoyment on staycation trip, which then leads to staycation experience sharing and tourists’ intention to re-staycation. Experience sharing mediates the influence of perceived enjoyment on staycation trip towards intention to re-staycation. Review credibility and gender differences moderate the relationships between variables.Research limitations/implications – This study has not yet look at the post-travel or staycation phase of tourists, thus further study is needed regarding post-travel evaluation. It also only uses variables that focus on tourists' perspectives regarding their travel experiences and sharing activities on social media.Practical implications – Service providers must pay attention to improving the atmosphere not only in terms of physical attributes but also related to the service products available in the hotel so that it can attract the intention to visit again. Offering accommodation experiences can enable potential tourists to return to the destination.Originality/value – Through the SOR framework, this study show how social influence can be a stimulus for individuals in perceiving enjoyment during their trip, leading them to show a behavioral response of sharing their staycation experience and have intention to go back to relive the moments.
... TripAdvisor has revolutionized the travel and tourism industry by becoming the largest online travel guide platform in just a few years (Filieri et al., 2021). For hotels, TripAdvisor serves as a benchmark for their online presence (Xie et al., 2014), and hotel revenues are influenced by reviews on aspects such as staff or facilities (Nieto-García et al., 2019). ...
... Reading user reviews before making a purchase has become a habit for many consumers (Filieri et al., 2021), making e-WOM a crucial source of information for decision-making in the tourism sector (Reyes-Menéndez et al., 2019). ...
... Following Filieri et al. (2021), we consider it relevant to analyse the evolution of this influential platform in recent years from both a business and academic perspective and to determine whether it will continue to be a prominent player in the tourism industry in the future. ...
TripAdvisor's remarkable growth since its launch is undeniable, with over 859 million reviews covering 8.6 million businesses by 2023. However, recent years have seen a noticeable stagnation, if not a decline, raising pertinent questions from both a business and academic perspective about its future as a key player in the tourism industry. Our research, launched in 2016, tracks monthly reviews of restaurants and hotels on TripAdvisor and Booking. It covers global destinations. It focuses on four well-known tourist hubs - Madrid, London, Paris and Rome - and covers the period from 2016 to 2022. The results show an initial phase (2017–2019) with a decrease in the annual growth rate of reviews in all destinations. The subsequent phase (2020–2021), influenced by pandemic-induced inactivity, showed minimal annual variation. The third phase shows a slight recovery, but no destination has exceeded a year-on-year variation of 4%. To counter this downward trend, TripAdvisor needs to implement innovative strategies and adapt its business model and user interaction processes. Such proactive measures are essential to overcome current challenges, ensure its relevance and maintain a pivotal role in the evolving tourism industry.
... As consumers' trust in the hotel increases, individuals' intention to make reservations and purchases increases similarly. The perceived ease of use in online consumer reviews provides consumer trust and satisfaction, positively affecting consumers' intention to use these platforms (Filieri et al., 2021). Amin et al. (2021) found that website quality, social availability, e-trust, and emotional commitment relate to the intention to book online. ...
... Third, there is a positive and significant relationship between the sense of trust in hotels' use of social media among the visitors staying in winter hotels in Turkey and the status of continuing to use social media in their preferences (H3). This finding is consistent with previous research (Filieri et al., 2021;Ramos et al., 2018). The ease of use perceived in online consumer reviews ensures consumer trust and satisfaction. ...
... In the Multifaceted Growth Stage, the study on eWOM in the hospitality industry shows clearly diverse growth. Filieri et al. (2021) conducted a structural equation model (SEM) to explore the key factors influencing users' continuation of user-generated content (UGC) platforms. It was suggested that the credibility and usefulness of online reviews had a significant positive effect on customer satisfaction and intentions to continue using these platforms, further expanding the application field of the IS Continuance Model. ...
... This is a significant concern for digital marketing managers (Mariani & Borghi, 2020). Moreover, the credibility and value of reviews on UGC platforms significantly impact customer satisfaction and postadoption continuance (Filieri et al., 2021). Nevertheless, eWOM measurement methods are problematic. ...
This paper performs a bibliometric analysis of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) research in the hospitality industry from 1981 to 2024, looking at trends, hot topics, and development patterns within this area. The methodology applies some bibliometric analysis methods and both HistCite and CiteSpace software for processing data and visualization. This study is based on an analysis of the annual publications, such as authorship identification, and a focus on journals, institutions, and countries. Meanwhile, it maps the citation network and identifies levels of research maturity and core themes in synthesis. The development stages are the Inception Stage (1981-2011), the Formative Stage (2013-2020), and the Multifaceted Growth Stage. The major core themes are eWOM and Hotel Performance, The Impact of Social Media and Consumer Motivation, Service Management and Recovery and Methodology. Moreover, keyword co-occurrence and burst detection analysis were utilized to identify its research hotspots and frontiers. The findings will enhance the literature by offering a deep understanding of eWOM research within the hospitality industry. These significant issues will serve as references for future research among scholars and industry professionals.
... Yelp CHI 67 365 - [117] Yelp NYC 359 952 - [118] TripAdvisor subset 800 50% [119] TripAdvisor 1600 800 [120] OpSpam 1600 800 [121] Hotel, doctor, restaurant (HDR) 1200 400 [122] 2) Yelp BERT. RoBERTa, DistilBERT ...
... In [119], a subset was contracted from TripAdvisor containing 800 reviews, with 50% fake. Also, in [120], 1600 reviews were collected, with almost 800 labeled as fake reviews. ...
Recommendation systems have proved to be a compelling performance in overcoming the data overload problem in many domains, such as e-commerce, e-health, and transportation. Recommender systems guide users/clients to personalized recommendations based on their preferences. However, some recommendation systems are vulnerable to shilling attacks, which create rating biases or fake reviews that will eventually affect the authenticity and integrity of the generated recommendations. This survey comprehensively covers various shilling attack methods, including high-knowledge, low-knowledge attacks, and obfuscated attacks. It explores malicious review generators that generate fake text. In addition to that, this survey covers shilling attack detection methods such as supervised, unsupervised, semisupervised, and hybrid techniques. Natural Language Processing techniques are also thoroughly explored for fake text review detection using large language models (LLMs). A wide range of detection mechanisms incorporated in the literature is examined, such as convolutional neural network (CNN), long short term memory (LSTM)-based detectors for rating-based shilling attacks, and bidirectional encoder representation (BERT) and RoBERTa-based detectors for fake reviews that are accompanied by shilling attacks, aiming to offer insights into the evolving methods of shilling attack strategies and the corresponding advancements in the detection methods.
... The research used validated instruments from earlier studies (Daneji et al., 2019;Filieri et al., 2021;Hosen et al., 2021;Shon et al., 2021;Wan et al., 2020;Wu & Chen, 2017;Zhang et al., 2022) to measure the latent constructs (Fowler, 2002) (See Appendix). Self-administered questionnaires reduced risk related to the reliability of the data and eliminated differences emerging from questions and their representation (Fowler, 2002). ...
... Studies have examined the influence of perceived usefulness on satisfactionSingh & Sharma, 2021;Yan et al., 2021).Filieri et al. (2021) investigated the continued intentions of consumers toward online tourism services. The study revealed that usefulness influences customer satisfaction, further impacting their continuance usage. Similarly, in the context of mobile health apps, the perceived usefulness of the apps led to satisfaction and further continued intentions of i ...
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gained popularity among sales professionals who use them for self-directed learning and upskilling. However, research related to their intentions to continue learning is scarce. Drawing from the social cognition theory, this research aimed to address this gap by investigating the role of task-technology fit, self-development, and social recognition in sales professionals’ continued use of MOOCs. The study hinged on empirical research and used a survey to collect data from 366 sales professionals. The results suggest that task-technology fit, self-development, and social recognition play a significant role in sales professionals’ continued use of MOOCs. The study has practical implications for organizations promoting employee learning and development. The findings provide valuable information for MOOC designers and providers to develop more effective courses that meet the needs of sales professionals.
... Online reviews are written by consumers for consumers and have been shown to influence the decision making processes of prospective clients or visitors (Manap and Adzharudin, 2013). Although its popularity was decreasing even prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) travel restrictions, TripAdvisor remains the largest user-generated tourist-review site (Filieri et al., 2021). Scholars have used TripAdvisor comments in multispecies ethnographies where a particular animal group is a key feature of the destination, such as captive civets within curated Balinese kopi luwak (civet coffee) tours (Hooper, 2022), wildlife tourist attractions (Cong et al., 2014;Moorhouse et al., 2015), or visitors to Japan's 'Rabbit Island' (Usui, 2021). ...
... Scholars have used TripAdvisor comments in multispecies ethnographies where a particular animal group is a key feature of the destination, such as captive civets within curated Balinese kopi luwak (civet coffee) tours (Hooper, 2022), wildlife tourist attractions (Cong et al., 2014;Moorhouse et al., 2015), or visitors to Japan's 'Rabbit Island' (Usui, 2021). Any concerns about fake promotional reviews or personal attacks on businesses (Filieri et al., 2021) will probably have less impact on the discourses surrounding cats because they are not directly part of the restaurants or hotels they frequent. ...
As a species the domestic cat (Felis catus) occupies a somewhat liminal status between a domesticated and wild, or ‘wild-like’ animal. While free-living urban cats are not typical tourist attractions, their presence does not go entirely unnoticed. This is especially so when they frequent restaurants and hotel grounds, feeding off food dropped by diners or thrown out by kitchen staff. This chapter takes an excursion into the world of the cats who live at one of two sites on the Costa del Sol, Spain. Personal encounters with free-living cats, and observations of how the cats interacted with each other and with humans provided a window into the local cat–human cultures. To gain insight into the tourist perspective, a thematic discourse analysis of English-language TripAdvisor reviews of hotels, cafes and restaurants in the area was employed. Emerging themes demonstrate how free-living cats are adored, abhorred, pitied and ignored by human visitors. Comments expressing the sentiment that local cats are an unsightly and unwelcome presence are examined within a broader framework of entitlement and tourist expectations. However, most visitors appear either indifferent towards the cats or express delight at watching and interacting with them. That the cats are well fed and human friendly suggests that most of their interactions with both human residents and tourists are positive. However, harmonious multispecies coexistence depends on an appreciation of cat–human cultures within the context of a traditional ‘sun and sea’ holiday destination and an economy built around tourism.
... Since reputation is crucial to the appeal of tourism and hospitality products, it is an important asset that requires investment and management (Berezina et al., 2016). For example, TripAdvisor is the largest online travel guide, with 411 million visitors every month checking out more than 700 million travel reviews available (Filieri, 2016;Filieri et al., 2021). Likewise, Booking.com has been identified as the leading online booking platform in the global online accommodation booking market (Martin-Fuentes et al., 2020); every day more than a million rooms are booked through this online platform. ...
This study investigates the impact of transactive memory systems (TMS) and innovation capabilities on the online reputation of hotels, a critical aspect in the digital age where consumer decisions are heavily influenced by online reviews. Through analyzing data from 118 managers of 3–5-star hotels in Spain and employing partial least squares and structural equation modeling (SEM), the research reveals that innovation capabilities significantly enhance online reputation, as reflected by customer satisfaction ratings on Booking.com and TripAdvisor. Furthermore, it uncovers that TMS components—specialization, credibility, and coordination—play a crucial role in fostering innovation capabilities. This research fills an important gap by linking TMS with online reputation, suggesting that effective knowledge management and innovation practices are key to improving online visibility and customer perception. Thus, it provides actionable strategies for hotel managers aiming to leverage their online reputation for a competitive advantage.
... The effects of credibility have not yet been investigated in the AC literature. However, the credibility of online platforms has been found to positively impact the continuance intention of their users (Filieri et al., 2021). We suppose this relationship is also transferable to the context of AC systems. ...
The use of algorithms to guide worker behavior, referred to as algorithmic control (AC), is increasingly prevalent in organizations. Despite its potential
operational benefits, prior research indicates that workers often struggle with
the opaque nature of such systems. Our research aims to explore how workers
perceive, judge, and react to AC systems when exposed to two distinct facets of
algorithmic transparency (AT): input and transformation AT. Through an experimental study with 121 participants, we provide empirical evidence that increased
transparency about the algorithm’s transformation process significantly enhances
workers’ perceived AT, which in turn positively impacts workers’ judgments and,
ultimately, their continuance intention and acceptance of an AC system. In doing
so, we provide practical recommendations for organizations to mitigate the adverse
effects associated with algorithmic control.
... Ease of use was one of the most important determinants of technology adoption intention to use. Previous studies proved that EOU played a crucial role in influencing users' intention to use a new technology or system (Filieri et al., 2020;Denaputri and Usman, 2019;Kasilingam, 2020;Singh and Srivastava, 2020;Akdim et al., 2022). When consumers found technologies convenient, they became more confident. ...
Indian financial sector has seen a dramatic change in recent years, with digital finance unlocking new possibilities for financial inclusion. This paper investigates the factors influencing the continuous usage intention and advocacy intention, regarding digital finance, in the Indian economy. Utilizing the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model, the study examines how ease of use, credibility and ubiquity (stimulus) could influence user trust, satisfaction, and engagement (organism), ultimately affecting their intention to use and recommend the service (response) continuously. Non-probability convenience sampling technique was used to select the study sample. Based on the results, features of digital financial platforms such as ease of use, credibility and ubiquity, were found to have a significant impact on user trust, satisfaction, and engagement. These factors partially mediate the stimulus and response variables. The research findings provide Digital Financial Service Providers (DFSPs) with practical guidance on creating and implementing user-centric platforms that create engagement and trust. User experience should be prioritized and making sure that platform should be accessible, easy to use and compatible with a variety of devices.
... However, TripAdvisor appears to have been clearly surpassed by the volume of reviews generated by Google. The irruption of Google Reviews in the tourism sector was evidenced in a 2019 article titled "How Google Reviews Is Crushing TripAdvisor" (Singh, 2019), which was further discussed in an academic article dealing with the usefulness of TripAdvisor in the face of Google's growth (Filieri et al., 2021). Moreover, a recent work entitled "Rise and Fall of TripAdvisor" (De Sandoval, 2024) shows a decline in the number of TripAdvisor reviews since 2021, which is partly attributed to competition from Google. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to identify not only the potential but also the limitations of Google reviews compared to TripAdvisor that may help researchers select the more appropriate information source.
Design/methodology/approach
The 10 most visited museums and theme parks in Europe were selected for this study. A total of 23,756 theme park reviews and 22,750 museum reviews were extracted from Google and TripAdvisor in November 2022 using the Octoparse tool. In a second round of data collection, reviews on Easter week 2023 were collected for the same destinations.
Findings
TripAdvisor offers a more comprehensive and accessible source of information compared to Google. However, the findings clearly indicate that Google has greater potential to accumulate reviews. The data also confirms that destinations tend to have higher ratings on Google than on TripAdvisor.
Practical implications
The research identifies a critical limitation in Google’s review system – a cap of 1,140 viewable and downloadable reviews per destination – posing a significant hindrance to researchers.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study providing a reasoned explanation for the limited scientific literature in tourism that uses Google reviews as a database. It offers a balanced comparison between TripAdvisor and Google that allows researchers to make a more reasoned decision regarding which information source to use depending on the study focus, the method and the data to be collected.
... During these times, the presence of internet has opened a window of opportunity in providing important advantages for businesses. The vast development of information and technology has also increase social interaction, as it can be an alternative to look for advice or share information, hence affecting consumer behavior (Filieri et al., 2021;Chan & Tung, 2023). The internet and IT has been rapidly utilized, and it is estimated that out of a global population of 7.4 billion, 2.9 billion are active internet users and this will continue to grow (Peng et al., 2021). ...
Research aims: This study aims to understand the role of perceived ease of use, information service function, consumer expectation, and user satisfaction in determining continuous purchase behavior in online travel application users, while considers consumer experience as a moderating variable.Design/Methodology/Approach: This study is carried out using quantitative approach. The data is collected by distributing online questionnaire to users of e-travel application in West Java, Indonesia chosen using purposive sampling. The data is processed using Structural Equation Modeling with Partial Least Square (SEM PLS).Research findings: The results indicate that perceived ease of use, information service function, consumer expectation, and user satisfaction can explain customers’ continuous purchase behavior. In addition, consumer experience can moderate the relationship between user satisfaction and continuous purchase behavior, by which higher experience strengthens the relationship. Theoretical Contribution/Originality: This study contributes to enrich the understanding of how user satisfaction affects continuous purchase behavior by looking at the variables of perceived ease of use, information service function, and user expectation.Practitioners/Policy Implications: This study can be of interest to service providers, especially e-travel application, to provide a good, easy to understand services, as well as information and comfort for its users to remain loyal in using the application.Research Limitations/Implications: This study is only limited to one object, namely users of e-travel application. Future research can use different objects and consider additional variables such as review credibility and perceived enjoyment in determining continuous purchase behavior.
... Academic research on the continuance intention of apps is more enthusiastic. From the research objects of the existing literature, academic studies on app continuance intention, such as knowledge payment, short video, psychology, and fitness, have been discussed [6,22,23], but studies on map and travel navigation apps are more limited. From the research content, the existing scholars' research on mobile app continuance intention is mostly based on improving existing theoretical models, users' online reviews, and the perceived characteristics of their use to construct app continuance intention models, and few scholars study the app characteristics as the starting point of its continuance intention [24,25]. ...
... These outcomes align with the findings of some investigations such as those of Lin and Kim, (2016) and Al-Eqab and Adel (2013). However, these outcomes conflict with the findings of some investigations such as Kang andNamkung (2019 andFilieri et al. (2021), which may be attributed to differences in user context and the evolving landscape of ECDIS technology, suggesting that older research may not fully capture recent technological advancements or the heightened emphasis on usercentric designs specific to maritime needs. ...
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has encouraged flexibility in the design of an Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS), resulting in a variety of capabilities, interfaces and functions. However, this diversity can create challenges in consistently presenting, interpreting and using critical navigational data, increasing the potential for navigational errors. The study explores the implementation of S-Mode, a standardized user interface for navigation equipment, to enhance situational awareness, safety and operational efficiency in maritime navigation. A quantitative survey was conducted with 417 deck officers who have experience with ECDIS of various types onboard ships. The study used Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze the data and evaluate the research hypotheses with descriptive analysis for research variables and participant profiles using AMOS and SPSS software, focusing on how the ease of use and usefulness of S-Mode influences its adoption among maritime professionals. The findings indicate that introducing S-Mode significantly improves responsiveness, information credibility, and operations quality, meeting critical navigational needs more effectively. The SEM analysis also showed that S-Mode reduces human error and facilitates recognition of different ECDIS models, highlighting the role of the interface in enhancing safety and efficiency. The study concludes by emphasizing the need for continuous and specialized type-specific training for ECDIS systems and advocates for establishing industry-wide standards in interface design to ensure consistency and safety in maritime navigation.
... Identification of customer preferences provides information about the types of food and beverages most appreciated, the atmosphere preferred by customers, and even expectations regarding the service provided. The reviews provide valuable insights for the development of marketing and business strategies and, as such, are considered a very useful tool for owners to better understand customer perception and market trends in these specific sectors (Filieri et al., 2021). When comparing the continuous increase in tourist demand in Lisbon with the low influx of tourists in Rio de Janeiro, it is clear that there is a disparity between the number of tourists visiting Lisbon and the entire Brazilian territory. ...
Purpose
Explore the role of traditional cafés in Lisbon and botequins in Rio de Janeiro in the history and culture of their respective cities, based on an analysis of the comments published on TripAdvisor.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a mixed methodology, 7,430 evaluations were analyzed, of which 5,473 were for Portuguese cafés and 1,957 for Brazilian botequins. A content analysis and statistical treatment were carried out. A line-by-line analysis was also conducted to code the emotions reported in the customer reviews.
Findings
The analysis categorized the comments into Gastronomy, Nostalgia, History and Heritage, and Quality of Service. Nostalgia garnered the highest percentage of positive comments for both Portuguese cafés and Brazilian botequins. These results emphasize the importance attached to sentimental connections and historical narratives, particularly those associated with notable individuals who frequented these places. Furthermore, no statistically significant differences were identified according to the type of establishment, which suggests a consistent pattern between cafés and traditional botequins.
Practical implications
Draws attention to the importance of a collaborative partnership between restaurant owners and tourism authorities. This strategic alliance not only serves to raise the cultural profile of cities, but also generates substantial economic benefits. It also ensures the lasting legacy of these historic establishments, celebrating the past, enriching the present and safeguarding the future.
Originality/value
Studying the cafés of Lisbon and the botequins of Brazil is important not only for understanding the history and culture of these countries but also for analyzing issues related to socialization, identity, artistic expression and urban transformations.
... Second, the literature has examined the impact of spillover effects in the context of ORRs [74,75]. By investigating the impact of the ORS (online review content) and ORRs of competitive products on focal product sales, we extend previous research on the spillover effects of online review content. ...
Studies have found that competitive products’ online review ratings (ORRs) have a spillover effect on the focal product’s sales. However, the spillover effect of online review sentiment (ORS) as an essential component of online review analysis has yet to be studied. In this study, we analyze online review content from JD.com using the latent Dirichlet allocation to identify the product attribute topics that consumers are most concerned about. We then construct a baseline regression model of ORS and ORRs to explore the effects of online competitive product reviews on focal product sales. Moreover, we examine how the interaction between ORS and critical factors of online reviews affect sales. Our results indicate that the ORS of competitive products has a negative effect on focal product sales, and the effect is greater than the ORS and ORRs of focal products, respectively. In addition, the ORS of competitive products inhibits the sale of focal products as evaluations of product attributes become more positive or online review usefulness increases. We also find that the effect of ORRs of competitive products is not significant, which may be because clothing, as an experiential product, requires consumers to gain more information about specific usage scenarios before making a decision. This study provides a more accurate basis for consumer decision-making and offers retailers a novel approach to developing marketing strategies.
... This study uses 478,000 customer reviews pertaining to the hotel industry and adopts automated content analysis to detect the sustainability-related content included within the text by customers. Data is collected from TripAdvisor, the largest and the leading user-generated content (UGC) platform in the tourism sector (Filieri et al., 2021). Data refer to six of the main cities in Europe in terms of international visitors' arrivals and cover ten years (2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017). ...
... TripAdvisor significantly influences consumer decision making, as travelers often consult its reviews to make informed choices about accommodations, dining, and attractions. The detailed user-generated content provides valuable insights into tourist satisfaction and dissatisfaction, making TripAdvisor an ideal source for analyzing nuanced aspects of the tourist experience [26]. ...
Hospitality services play a crucial role in shaping tourist satisfaction and revisiting intention toward destinations. Traditional feedback methods like surveys often fail to capture the nuanced and real-time experiences of tourists. Digital platforms such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Reviews provide a rich source of user-generated content, but the sheer volume of reviews makes manual analysis impractical. This study proposes integrating aspect-based sentiment analysis with zero-shot learning to analyze online tourist reviews effectively without requiring extensive annotated datasets. Using pretrained models like RoBERTa, the research framework involves keyword extraction, sentence segment detection, aspect construction, and sentiment polarity measurement. The dataset, sourced from TripAdvisor reviews of attractions, hotels, and restaurants in Central Java, Indonesia, underwent preprocessing to ensure suitability for analysis. The results highlight the importance of aspects such as food, accommodation, and cultural experiences in tourist satisfaction. The findings indicate a need for continuous service improvement to meet evolving tourist expectations, demonstrating the potential of advanced natural language processing techniques in enhancing hospitality services and customer satisfaction.
... For instance, TripAdvisor has influenced the travel and tourism industry by becoming the go-to online travel guide for millions of people worldwide (Cassar, Caruana, and Konietzny 2020). Along with reviews and ratings, TripAdvisor also offers photos and forums, providing a comprehensive trip planning guide (Filieri et al. 2021). However, despite being the most extensive online travel guide, its monthly users declined due to its competition from Google, whose reviews about hospitality services have been steadily growing, making it the preferred platform for mobile searches (Calero-Sanz et al. 2022). ...
As social platforms experience an influx of diverse content from users, the need to determine high-quality contributions becomes crucial, especially for educational purposes. This paper highlights the pivotal role of quality in assessing how educational-purposed user-generated content (UGC) shapes user experiences, fosters engagement, and establishes credibility. This study proposes a computational framework using a quasi-experimental evaluation through the sorting-based ELimination Et Choice TRanslating Reality, termed ELECTRE-SORT, with a dataset randomly generated from normally distributed user evaluations. Considering the diverse nature of contents, the method evaluates 16 educational-purposed UGC videos from different online media platforms (i.e. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok). These videos were categorized based on their concordance and discordance to three (3) main criteria: content quality, design quality, and technology quality. Employing the ELECTRE-SORT reveals that most UGC videos (i.e. 14 out of 16) fall into the “medium quality” category, possessing a considerable standard for the quality of educational purpose content. Their characteristics generally satisfy the quality attributes and can be used to guide the development of future relevant UGC videos. Finally, to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach, we presented a sensitivity analysis by designing different weight assignments to the quality attributes. Practical insights are outlined in this work.
... User-generated content on destinations and tourism experiences is a means of influencing tourist choices [36][37][38][39] in the face of an overwhelming abundance of opinions that can sometimes lead to confusion and suboptimal decisions [40,41]. These users rely on the social proof heuristic by evaluating the negativity and positivity of aggregated opinions, or the so-called valence, based on the experiences of the evaluators [42,43]. In the context of tourism, the terms "positive" and "negative" can generally refer to "satisfied" and "dissatisfied" [44]. ...
The allure of urban green spaces has captured the attention of researchers, especially in regions abundant in botanical wonders worldwide. Surprisingly, the case of Morocco, a country with a strong botanical tradition, has received little attention from researchers. Here, we explore the unique case of the emblematic “Majorelle Garden” in Marrakech, southern Morocco, through the reviews of its many visitors posted on the TripAdvisor platform. This article looks at the question “to what extent can a garden—such as the Majorelle—be a major attraction in a cultural tourist destination?”. Methodologically, we adopted a quantitative approach, examining visitors’ sentiments using the VADER tool from 2006 to 2023, and classifying them into three categories: negative, neutral, and positive. Furthermore, by utilizing LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation), we uncover key topics running through visitors’ experiences. Our findings show that positive sentiments prevail, given the culturo-historical and symbolic quality of the garden as a crucible and vector of creativity, with the emergence of sub-corpuses that highlight certain divergences and convergences around the “Majorelle” case. This insight supports sustainability efforts by empowering the managers of the garden studied and industry professionals to develop and implement relevant strategies for managing and marketing the garden tourism attraction experience. In addition, this case study shows how a private urban garden reveals its key role in preserving cultural and botanical heritage, essential for future generations. It shows the garden’s positive impact on sustainable tourism through its ability to attract cultural visitors who appreciate and respect the local environment.
... Large scale analyses of social media during elections [43,44], patient-centred care for chronic illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and diabetes [45][46][47], real-time depression detection on social networks [48,49], expressions of emotion and sentiment during the COVID-19 global pandemic [50][51][52], highlight the practical value in social and individual settings. In organisational settings, financial sentiment analysis [53], understanding consumer satisfactions [54], the role of social media in stock price moments [55], and the influence of review credibility and review usefulness [56] are pivotal studies that signify the continuing and incremental value of emotion analysis in digitalised content for all stakeholders. ...
Emotions are fundamental to human behaviour. How we feel, individually and collectively, determines how humanity evolves and advances into our shared future. The rapid digitalisation of our personal, social and professional lives means we are frequently using digital media to express, understand and respond to emotions. Although recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are able to analyse sentiment and detect emotions, they are not effective at comprehending the complexity and ambiguity of digital emotion expressions in knowledge-focused activities of customers, people, and organizations. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel AI framework for the adaptable, robust, and explainable detection of multi-granular assembles of emotions. This framework consolidates lexicon generation and finetuned Large Language Model (LLM) approaches to formulate multi-granular assembles of two, eight and fourteen emotions. The framework is robust to ambiguous emotion expressions that are implied in conversation, adaptable to domain-specific emotion semantics, and the assembles are explainable using constituent terms and intensity. We conducted nine empirical studies using datasets representing diverse human emotion behaviours. The results of these studies comprehensively demonstrate and evaluate the core capabilities of the framework, and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in adaptable, robust, and explainable multi-granular emotion detection.
... TripAdvisor, founded in 2000, has revolutionized how travelers plan and experience their trips (Sigala, 2015;Filieri et al., 2021;Mahat and Hanafiah, 2020). As one of the world's largest travel platforms, TripAdvisor provides a wealth of user-generated content, including reviews, ratings, and recommendations for accommodations, restaurants, and activities (Van der Zee and Bertocchi, 2018; Sumarsono et al., 2019;Van der Zee et al., 2020). ...
Purpose
This study aims to use TripAdvisor data to identify which themes and events will attract more interest in the future of tourism activities and to provide guidance to the industry accordingly.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used qualitative case study approach. To identify key themes in the top-rated activities, thematic analysis of user-generated content was conducted through MAXQDA 2020 Analytics Pro software.
Findings
The findings of this study indicate a growing trend in tourist preferences, with a notable increase in the popularity of wellness activities such as spa treatments and yoga retreats. Tourists also highly prefer cultural experiences like local festivals and historical tours, adventure activities such as hiking and water sports, and food-related activities like cooking classes and wine tastings. There is a significant trend towards sustainable and environmentally friendly tourism activities. These results underscore the need to cater to diverse tourist interests in developing future tourism offerings.
Practical implications
Developing innovative events, using data-driven marketing strategies, involving local communities, and catering to diverse preferences can enhance the sustainability and competitiveness of the tourism sector.
Social implications
Understanding tourists' tendencies towards cultural, adventurous and sustainable experiences helps tourism operators and managers to create offers that satisfy tourists while promoting environmentally friendly practices. This shift promotes cultural preservation, environmental protection and community involvement.
Originality/value
This study uniquely analyzes top-rated TripAdvisor activities to identify key trends in tourist preferences, highlighting the growing demand for cultural, adventurous, gastronomic, and sustainable tourism.
... website, confirming that the website is the largest travel guide in the world. According to Kinstler (2018) and Filieri, Acikgoz, Ndou, & Dwivedi (2020), 1 in 16 people consult TripAdvisor.com to plan their vacation, which is why the opinions posted on the site are so important to the tourism sector. ...
The analysis of the polarity of various types of comments has been enhanced by the development of Web 2.0, where millions of user-generated opinions on different sites now offer a wealth of information. Opinion mining focuses on automatically determining the polarity of posts for research and the development of real-world applications. This article aims to determine which of the proposed algorithms (Decision Trees, Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, and Convolutional Neural Network) are most suitable for predicting the polarity of opinions in the tourism domain. For this purpose, a set of opinions (30,210) from the REST-MEX 2022 Sentiment Analysis competition, pertaining to hotels, attractions, and restaurants, is used. The experimental results obtained show that the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is the best classifier, achieving an accuracy of 98.83%, followed by the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes with accuracies of 71% and 70% respectively. The worst performance was observed with Decision Trees, which achieved 62% accuracy.
... In the realm of food-ordering chatbots, it has been established that user satisfaction serves as a potent predictor of future usage intentions (Hsiao and Chen, 2022). Additionally, research has identified the influence of consumers' satisfaction with AI-powered review platforms on continuance use intentions (Filieri et al., 2020). The level of user satisfaction derived from apps' performance in mobile travel interactions can also be used to predict consumers' continued usage . ...
... Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa information usefulness berpengaruh signifikan positif terhadap purchase intention. Hal ini sejalan dengan hasil penelitian yang dilakukan oleh Fathima Nushra & Mubarak, (2022), Filieri et al, (2021), Oliveira et al, (2020), Rahaman et al, (2022), Tapanainen et al, (2021. Kegunaan informasi berpengaruh pada niat pembelian. ...
ABSTRAK Pengguna smartphone pada tahun 2022 sebanyak 6.567 juta pengguna dan akan terus bertambah. Smartphone memiliki banyak fungsi dalam kehidupan sehari-hari seperti mengirim pesan secara instan, berbagi informasi, sebagai media hiburan, mencari teman dan media untuk berjualan. Kemajuan teknologi yang semakin canggih menyebabkan kata tradisional dari mulut ke mulut (WOM) telah ketinggalan zaman dan berubah menjadi kata elektronik dari mulut ke mulut (eWOM). Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu menganalisis pengaruh karakteristik informasi EWOM dan perilaku konsumern terhadap niat beli smartphone di kota Batam. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini ialah metode kualitatif. Pengumpulan melalui kuesioner dengan kriterianya yaitu generasi Z dengan rentang usia 10-25 tahun yang menggunakan media sosial twitter, instagram, facebook, tiktok, dan youtube. Pada pesebaran kuesioner terdapat 22 pertanyaan sehingga jumlah sample yang dapat digunakan adalah 220 sample dengan rasio 1:10. Selanjutnya, data dianalisis menggunakan PLS-SEM. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa i nformation quality , information credibility tidak berpengaruh signifikan terhadap purchase intention , sedangkan i nformation usefulness berpengaruh signifikan terhadap purchase intention. Kata Kunci: Smartphone, E-WOM, Purchase Intention ABSTR ACT Smartphone users in 2022 will be 6,567 million users and will continue to grow. Smartphones have many functions in everyday life such as sending instant messages, sharing information, as a medium for entertainment, finding friends and a medium for selling. Increasingly sophisticated technological advances have caused traditional word of mouth (WOM) to become outdated and change to electronic word of mouth (eWOM). The aim of this research is to analyze the influence of EWOM information characteristics and consumer behavior on smartphone purchase intentions in the city of Batam. The method used in this research is a qualitative method. Collection via questionnaire with the criteria being generation Z with an age range of 10-25 years who use social media Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. In distributing the questionnaire there were 22 questions so that the number of samples that could be used was 220 samples with a ratio of 1:10. Next, the data was analyzed using PLS-SEM. The research results show that information quality, information credibility do not have a significant effect on purchase intention, while information usefulness has a significant effect on purchase intention. K eywords : Smartphone, E-WOM, Purchase Intention
... Stopwords are frequently occurring English words that have significantly less or no utility in text analytics, such as "is," "the," and "are." As a last step of text cleaning, all words are website, to gain insight into the tourists' experience (Filieri et al., 2021). Recent studies have found that this website is a valuable source of qualitative and quantitative data that are both natural and impartial (Amatulli et al., 2019;Zaman et al., 2016). ...
This paper investigates the experiences of tourists visiting a cremation site, an unconventional tourist destination. By analyzing online reviews collected from TripAdvisor, using text mining and natural language processing (NLP) techniques, the study aims to fill the gaps in the literature on tourists’ experiences at cremation sites. The study explores the differences in the experiences of Indian domestic tourists and those from other cultural backgrounds. This study applies the views of Urry’s gaze theory and Stone’s dark tourism classification theory to discuss the tourists’ experiences. The results reveal significant differences in the experiences of Indian and international tourists. The emotion of foreign tourists lies with the existential and philosophical dimension, and Indian tourists are more connected with religious and mythological dimensions. The results validate Urry’s gaze theory and disagree with Stone's dark tourism classification. This research contributes to the existing knowledge of dark tourism by providing valuable insights into tourists' experiences at unconventional sites. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of location managers understanding the significance of tourists' experiences at sites to create enjoyable tours for domestic and international visitors. The paper will benefit casual vacationers, academics, and scholars specializing in dark tourism, travelers’ narratives, online reviews, NLP, and trip organizers.
... The impact of eWOM on purchase intention is the most highlighted topic (Filieri et al., 2015). The research on hospitality industry varies by culture (Filieri et al., 2020). Marketers should put emphasis on obtaining significant feedback with photographs and videos as a booster since customers believe that these reviews are more credible. ...
Advanced technologies such as smart phones and 4G internet have created more opportunities for e-shopping. Individuals are switching their purchases from traditional to digital with the help of electronic commerce. The customer usually evaluates a product by reading other user recommendations on blogs, online sites, and some other social media platforms, commonly termed as eWOM (electronic word of mouth). Reviews and ratings on the internet influence a traveler's decision to reserve an accommodation. The research study examines the influence of eWOM credibility on the purchase intention. The research also examined the role of trust and perceived risk as mediating factors between eWOM credibility and purchase intention. The Questionnaire study was carried on 687 individuals over the age of 18. PLS-SEM was used to examine the data. The eWOM credibility significantly impacted traveler purchasing intentions. The mediator in the relationship between eWOM credibility and purchase intention was trust, not perceived risk. The study recommends that marketers validate the source of information and prioritise the reviews that are perceived as more credible and establish a favourable intention towards online booking.
In an era where the digital image of a destination can be as influential as actual experiences, this chapter will evaluate how Spain and Portugal use digital platforms to cultivate and promote their identities as luxury destinations. Through a methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, the effectiveness of the digital marketing techniques employed will be examined, including content management on social media, user interaction, and the adaptation of marketing strategies to changes in consumer preferences and behaviours. Additionally, our research leverages user-generated content, specifically comments extracted from TripAdvisor, to gauge perceptions of luxury hotels in both countries. By analyzing these comments, we gain insights into customer satisfaction, expectations, and the overall reputation of the hotels. This comprehensive approach allows us to assess the strategies deployed by these destinations and their real-world impact on the luxury tourism market.
As information technology rapidly advances and becomes increasingly digitalized, short video platforms have emerged as vital instruments for marketing tourist destinations, significantly influencing visitors' perceptions and decision-making processes. This study analyses the ways in which short video content affects visitors' intentions to visit tourism locations in Jiangxi Province. It also examines how tourists' impressions of short videos serve a mediation role in this process. The study formulates a theoretical model comprising four dimensions-perceived trustworthiness, perceived delight, perceived utility, and perceived ease of use-to assess their influence on visitors' visiting intentions. This paradigm is based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) theory, the Technology Acceptance paradigm (TAM), and the Source Credibility Theory. The study employed a quantitative research methodology, utilizing structured questionnaire surveys to gather extensive data from potential tourists, subsequently analysed by structural equation modelling (SEM). The findings indicate that factors associated with short video content significantly and directly influence travelers' intentions to visit, with travelers' opinions towards short films serving as a crucial mediating factor in this relationship. Positive attitudes towards short films are significantly amplified by perceived utility and reliability, thereby elevating tourists' intentions to come. The emotional connection of tourists is fostered by perceived delight, which then promotes the formation of visitation intentions. The perceived ease of use enhances interest and intentions to visit by facilitating the acquisition and comprehension of information. The research highlights the significant role of tourists' perceptions in mediating the relationship between visit intentions and the qualities of short video content. This research indicates that a positive mindset enhances visitor intentions and intensifies the impact of short video content characteristics. The study recommends that destination administrators and marketers focus on improving the authenticity, enjoyment, practicality, and functionality of short video content to effectively capture tourists' attention and promote travel. This study provides theoretical and practical guidance for the future use of short films in tourism promotion, together with empirical evidence to support the marketing strategies of Jiangxi Province's tourist attractions. This study offers effective strategies to enhance the competitiveness of tourism destinations in the digital age by elucidating the complex relationship between short video content features and tourists' propensity to visit.
This research investigates the psychology and behavior of users engaging in short-form video shopping platforms (SVSP) from a user experience perspective. By extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Information System Success Model (ISS), an intention-to-use model for SVSP was developed. We conducted a survey on participants of SVSP shopping through the Questionnaire Star platform, obtaining 1,026 valid responses. Structural equation modeling (SEM-AMOS) was utilized to validate the hypotheses. Key findings include: perceived usefulness positively influences user engagement, purchase intention, and satisfaction; information quality positively impacts purchase intention; perceived ease of use negatively affects user engagement and satisfaction. Indirect effects on use intention were observed via mediation variables. Additionally, price negatively moderates the relationship between satisfaction, user engagement, and purchase intention. These findings contribute to theory and emphasizes user experience and provides actionable insights for sellers to boost engagement and satisfaction, along with managerial strategies to optimize short-form video live shopping experiences.
This research explores the influence of social media reviews as mediators of perceived usefulness and trust on the intention to visit Yogyakarta's beaches. With the rapid growth of social media usage, particularly in travel decision-making, understanding how social media reviews affect tourists' intentions is crucial. Using a quantitative approach, data was collected through an online survey distributed via Google Forms. The study's participants included 168 respondents, primarily from Indonesia, encompassing various demographics such as gender, age, education, occupation, and income. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to analyze the data, revealing significant relationships between perceived usefulness, trust, social media review intensity, and intention to visit. The findings underscore the pivotal role of social media in shaping travel intentions by enhancing perceived usefulness and fostering trust through intensive and credible reviews. This study contributes to tourism literature by offering insights into the mechanisms through which social media influences travel decision-making, particularly in culturally rich destinations like Yogyakarta.
This study aims to confirm the relevance of consumer generated content in the context of food industry of Pakistan to influence purchase intention of consumers. The communication landscape has changed drastically since the introduction of social media tools. There is a little understanding about how user-generated social media communication influences consumer behavior. User-generated content (UGC) is content that users create and post on social media platforms. It [1]has made it possible for customers to communicate and share information online with other customers. The current study, first, assesses the impact of user generated content on perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived credibility (PC) of product content which users create on Facebook. Secondly, it assesses the impact of PU and PC on consumers’ attitude towards product. Lastly, it examines the impact of consumers’ attitude towards product on their intention to select hotel, restaurant and cafe (HORECA). Data for this study is collected from 384 residents of Karachi, Pakistan. Data is analyzed through structure equation modeling using Amos. The results reveal that consumers find UGC useful and credible which influences consumers’ attitude toward a service. This attitude towards product or service has significant impact on the choice of HORECA. Findings of this study have useful implications for practitioners.
The study is an analysis of the online reviews written by customers about Taj Falaknuma a heritage hotel in Hyderabad. It aims to analyze reviews with polarity classification and to identify the overall sentiment of the collected reviews. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 1,000 online reviews about the hotel were collected from the TripAdvisor website and web scraping was done by using a beautiful soup package in Python. Orange data mining software was applied to pre-process and analyze the data. VADER sentiment analysis is used to generate the polarity and overall sentiment of the reviews. The study categorizes the emotions of reviews as positive, neutral, and negative. Findings: Results revealed that 99.9 % or 999 out of 1000 responses have a compound sentiment of positive and only 0.01 or 1 out of 1000 responses have a compound sentiment of negative. Reviews that have received a rating of 5 or 4 are regarded as being favourable reviews, whereas reviews that have received a rating of 1 or 2 are regarded as being negative reviews. Originality/value: The study is a rare attempt to examine online customer reviews of Taj Falaknuma using a text mining approach and to identify the sentiment scores of the online reviews to know the satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Purpose: In business, online reviews have an economic impact on firm performance. The study is an analysis of the online reviews written by customers about Taj Udaipur a heritage hotel in Hyderabad. It aims to analyze reviews with polarity classification and to identify the overall sentiment of the collected reviews. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 3000 online reviews about the hotel were collected from the TripAdvisor website and web scraping was done by using a beautiful soup package in Python. Orange data mining software was applied to pre-process and analyze the data. VADER sentiment analysis is used to generate the polarity and overall sentiment of the reviews. The study categorizes the emotions of reviews as positive, neutral, and negative. Findings: The sentiment analysis and topic modelling performed on internet reviews of Taj Udaipur have uncovered fascinating insights regarding the overall experience of guests. Upon analyzing the sentiments conveyed by reviewers, a prevailing sense of optimism becomes apparent, as a substantial majority express satisfaction and pleasure. The emotion distribution reveals a positive inclination towards several aspects of the heritage hotel. Originality/value: The study is a rare attempt to examine online customer reviews of Taj using a text mining approach and to identify the sentiment scores of the online reviews to know the satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Online retailers in emerging markets like South Africa are adopting Bitcoin payments. This study explores factors driving consumer adoption and word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations for Bitcoin in online transactions. Using an integrated model combining valency theory, social contagion theory, and the technology acceptance model (TAM), we analyse data from 521 South African online shoppers. Findings reveal that perceived usefulness, ease of use, social pressures, trust, and perceived risk significantly influence both adoption and WOM. Importantly, self-efficacy moderates the relationship between these factors and behaviour. This research contributes to the literature by offering a comprehensive understanding of Bitcoin adoption. For business and policy actors, enhancing consumer self-efficacy can foster trust, ease concerns, and encourage positive WOM, ultimately aiding successful Bitcoin implementation and promotion.
Purpose
This study aims to develop and test an integrative model that examines the effects of customization and perceived employee authenticity on customer delight, which in turn influences customers’ willingness to recommend (WTR) and willingness to pay a premium (WTPP) as outcomes in a hotel context. The moderating role of online review valence in this process is also examined.
Design/methodology/approach
This study adopts a 2 (customization: low vs high) × 2 (perceived employee authenticity: low vs high) × 2 (online review valence: negative vs positive) experimental design. A total of 409 US consumers were recruited and randomly assigned to a hotel check-in scenario. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships.
Findings
Findings confirmed the role of customer delight in mediating customization and employee authenticity on WTR and WTPP. In addition, perceived employee authenticity was a stronger driver of customer delight for consumers exposed to negative online reviews than for those exposed to positive reviews.
Practical implications
The findings provide useful guidance in designing efficient service strategies for generating a delightful customer experience. Hotel practitioners should provide customized services and manage employees in a way that helps them deliver authentic services that achieve customer delight. Understanding that customer expectations formed through online reviews play a significant role in service evaluations, hotel managers make an extra effort to monitor online reviews and manage customer expectations.
Originality/value
Although existing research suggests that customer delight plays an important role in positive consumer outcomes, there is still potential space to explore the theoretical mediational mechanisms underlying this effect and the moderating effect on this relationship between customer delight and consumer responses. This study contributes by testing the moderating impact of online review valence and the mediating impact of customer delight.
Purpose
Given the critical role of user-generated content (UGC) in e-commerce, exploring various aspects of UGC can aid in understanding user purchase intention and commodity recommendation. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of UGC on purchase decisions and proposes new recommendation models based on sentiment analysis, which are verified in Douban, one of the most popular UGC websites in China.
Design/methodology/approach
After verifying the relationship between various factors and product sales, this study proposes two models, collaborative filtering recommendation model based on sentiment (SCF) and hidden factors topics recommendation model based on sentiment (SHFT), by combining traditional collaborative filtering model (CF) and hidden factors topics model (HFT) with sentiment analysis.
Findings
The results indicate that sentiment significantly influences purchase intention. Furthermore, the proposed sentiment-based recommendation models outperform traditional CF and HFT in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Moreover, the two models yield different outcomes for various product categories, providing actionable insights for organizers to implement more precise recommendation strategies.
Practical implications
The findings of this study advocate the incorporation of UGC sentimental factors into websites to heighten recommendation accuracy. Additionally, different recommendation strategies can be employed for different products types.
Originality/value
This study introduces a novel perspective to the recommendation algorithm field. It not only validates the impact of UGC sentiment on purchase intention but also evaluates the proposed models with real-world data. The study provides valuable insights for managerial decision-making aimed at enhancing recommendation systems.
This study aims to bridge a significant research gap in the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) literature: measuring the effect of the degree of online review helpfulness (ORH) on firms’ financial performance. As studies of the impact of ORH on firm performance in the context of service industries in general and more specifically in the hospitality sector are virtually nonexistent, this work intends to offer insights to eWOM researchers by analyzing if and to what extent ORH affects the financial performance of hospitality firms. Based on a re-visitation of the antecedents of ORH stemming from information adoption models, social influence theory and dual process theory, we analyze the moderating effects of the degree of ORH on the relationships between online review valence/volume and firms’ financial performance. Based on the examination of 395,964 online reviews related to 261 higher-end hotels located in London, the third most visited destination worldwide, we find that the degree of ORH positively moderates the positive effect of the reviews’ valence on financial performance, while it does not moderate significantly the positive effect of the reviews’ volume on financial performance. Theoretical contributions to the nascent research stream taking an outcome-oriented approach to the study of eWOM helpfulness and managerial implications are discussed.
Chatbots are mainly text-based conversational agents that simulate conversations with users. This study aims to investigate drivers of users’ satisfaction and continuance intention toward chatbot-based customer service. We propose an analytical framework combining the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), information system success (ISS) model, TAM, and the need for interaction with a service employee (NFI-SE). Analysis of data collected from 370 actual chatbot users reveals that information quality (IQ) and service quality (SQ) positively influence consumers’ satisfaction, and that perceived enjoyment (PE), perceived usefulness (PU), and perceived ease of use (PEOU) are significant predictors of continuance intention (CI). The need for interaction with an employee moderates the effects of PEOU and PU on satisfaction. The findings also revealed that satisfaction with chatbot e-service is a strong determinant and predictor of users’ CI toward chatbots. Thus, chatbots should enhance their information and service quality to increase users’ satisfaction. The findings imply that digital technologies services, such as chatbots, could be combined with human service employees to satisfy digital users.
The established preference for words featuring consonants ordered inward in the oral cavity—the in–out effect, may assist marketeers when naming new products and services. To investigate the conditions under which this effect may affect consumer preference we conducted four experiments (N = 818) examining the influence of consonant wanderings in the evaluation of different professionals and food products. While inward articulation direction selectively biased warmth judgments about workers who are perceived as relatively neutral on both warmth and competence, for professionals traditionally associated with either a warmth or a competence dimension inward‐wandering usernames systematically presented a competitive advantage. In the same way, hypothetical food products with inward‐wandering names were judged as more hedonic and more utilitarian. The present evidence supports the potential of the in–out effect to market products and services and highlights the relevance of exploiting this and other oral kinematics phenomena as an asset for managerial practice.
Initial trust represents the trust that develops upon first use of a product. It is built on the basis of the net effect of factors that stimulate as well as inhibit it. Future transactions require less consumer effort after initial-trust formation. Despite being recognized as an important factor affecting the adoption of innovations, initial trust has been not been greatly explored by prior scholars. The present study remedies this gap by invoking the information systems success (ISS) model, transaction cost economics (TCE) theory, and the IT continuance model to propose a two-step framework that includes the antecedents of a pre-adoption factor, such as initial trust, and post-adoption factors, such as confirmation, perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and continuation intention toward mobile-based payments. Cross-sectional data of 954 first-time mobile-wallet users are analyzed to test the framework. The study findings suggest that information and service quality positively influence initial trust, which, in turn, has a positive association with confirmation and perceived usefulness. Results also reveal a positive relationship between perceived usefulness and continuation intention. These results pave the way for making useful recommendations for future researchers. The study also discusses various inferences that can improve managerial efficacy in promoting the use of mobile-based payment methods.
Purpose
This study aims to evaluate the vitality of source, receiver and message factors on credibility assessment of online hotel reviews. Further, the current study determines the effects of perceived credibility of online reviews (PCOR) on hotel booking intentions (HBI).
Design/methodology/approach
The current study performs reliability analysis to determine the internal consistency of the measurement scales and to ensure the uni-dimensionality of the measurement scales the present study performs exploratory factor analysis. Further, the present study performs structural equation modeling to identify the relationships between the variables.
Findings
Two-sided online reviews have a more significant positive impact on PCOR as compared to the effects of receiver, review quality, review consistency and negative-sided online reviews.
Originality/value
This is one of the first study that analyses the impact of source, receiver and message on PCOR. Moreover, the present study offered theoretical justification behind the factors that affect the authenticity of online hotel reviews and its effects on HBI.
The number of online experiments conducted with subjects recruited via online platforms has grown considerably in the recent past. While one commercial crowdworking platform - Amazon's Mechanical Turk - basically has established and since dominated this field, new alternatives offer services explicitly targeted at researchers. In this article, we present www.prolific.ac and lay out its suitability for recruiting subjects for social and economic science experiments. After briefly discussing key advantages and challenges of online experiments relative to lab experiments, we trace the platform's historical development, present its features, and contrast them with requirements for different types of social and economic experiments.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review the impact electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has had on the hospitality and tourism industry and to discuss changes that will affect its future. The paper’s touchpoint is our earlier paper (Litvin et al., 2008), which proposed that eWOM was to become a major influence as a conduit of travelers’ views and opinions.
Design/methodology/approach
The article summarizes arguments in our earlier paper, describing ways in which eWOM has evolved into the influential system it has become, with special emphasis on the growth of mobile media as a platform for eWOM dissemination.
Findings
We conclude that eWOM has fulfilled its promise to become a major influence on the hospitality and tourism industry and will continue to play an essential role in hospitality marketing for the foreseeable future.
Practical implications
We provide examples of successful media campaigns and propose strategies for hospitality and tourism businesses.
Originality/value
eWOM has emerged to become a highly influential element of modern marketing strategy. This look back at an early eWOM article, with reflection on changes that have occurred and a view to the future, is of value as validation of an often cited article that set the stage for much subsequent hospitality research.
Personal data lie at the forefront of different business models and constitute the main source of revenue of several online companies. In many cases, consumers may have incomplete information or may be inattentive about the digital transactions of their data. This paper investigates whether highlighting positive or negative aspects of online privacy policies, thereby mitigating the informational problem, can affect consumers’ privacy actions and attitudes. Results of an online survey experiment indicate that participants adopt a more conservative stance on disclosing sensitive and identifiable information, even when positive attitudes of companies towards their privacy are made salient, compared to when privacy is not mentioned. On the other hand, they do not change their attitudes and social actions towards privacy. These findings suggest that privacy behavior is not necessarily sensitive to exposure to objective threats or benefits of disclosing personal information. Rather, people are inattentive and their dormant privacy concerns may manifest only when consumers are asked to think about privacy.
Provides a nontechnical introduction to the partial least squares (PLS) approach. As a logical base for comparison, the PLS approach for structural path estimation is contrasted to the covariance-based approach. In so doing, a set of considerations are then provided with the goal of helping the reader understand the conditions under which it might be reasonable or even more appropriate to employ this technique. This chapter builds up from various simple 2 latent variable models to a more complex one. The formal PLS model is provided along with a discussion of the properties of its estimates. An empirical example is provided as a basis for highlighting the various analytic considerations when using PLS and the set of tests that one can employ is assessing the validity of a PLS-based model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We propose that personal relative deprivation (PRD)—the belief that one is worse off than similar others—plays a key role in the link between social class and prosociality. Across multiple samples and measures (total N ¼ 2,233), people higher in PRD were less inclined to help others. When considered in isolation, neither objective nor subjective socioeconomic status (SES) was meaningfully associated with prosociality. However, because people who believe themselves to be at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy are typically low in PRD, these variables act as mutual suppressors—the predictive validity of both is enhanced when they are considered simultaneously, revealing that both higher subjective SES and higher PRD are associated with lower prosociality. These results cast new light on the complex connections between relative social status and people's willingness to act for the benefit of others.
Purpose
Online consumer reviews have become increasingly important for consumer decision-making. One of the most prominent examples is the hotel industry where consumer reviews on websites, such as Bookings.com, TripAdvisor and Venere.com, play a critical role in consumers’ choice of a hotel. There have been a number of recent studies analyzing various aspects of online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to investigate their effects in terms of hotel occupancy rates.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper measures through regression analysis the impact of three dimensions of consumer reviews (i.e. review score, review variance and review volume) on the occupancy rates of 346 hotels located in Rome, isolating a number of other factors that might also affect demand.
Findings
Review score is the dimension with the highest impact. The results suggest that after controlling for other variables, a one-point increase in the review score is associated to an increase in the occupancy rate by 7.5 percentage points. Regardless the review score, the number of reviews has a positive effect, but with decreasing returns, implying that the higher the number of reviews, the lower the beneficial effect in terms of occupancy rates is.
Practical implications
The findings quantify the strong association of online reviews to occupancy rates suggesting the use of appropriate reputational management systems to increase hotel occupancy and therefore performance.
Originality/value
A major contribution of this paper is its comprehensiveness in analyzing the relation between online consumer reviews and occupancy across a heterogeneous sample of hotels.
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine guests’ experiences at green hotels and the impact of green experience on customer satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach – A total of 727 green reviews (reviews on green experiences) of the top 10 green hotels in the U.S. were downloaded from TripAdvisor for content analysis. Descriptive statistics and ordinal logistic regressions were then employed.
Findings – Guests have both positive and negative experiences at green hotels. “Energy,” “purchasing,” and “education and innovation” are the most frequently discussed green practices. Some guests’ green experiences, such as “guest training,” “energy,” “water,” “purchasing,” and “education and innovation” significantly influence their overall satisfaction with hotels. Compared with basic green practices, advanced green practices tend to have greater impacts on customer satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications – This study provides insight into guests’ green experiences at hotels and their impact on customer satisfaction. More importantly, this study examines the contribution of different types of green practices to customer satisfaction. Since the green hotels examined in this study were not randomly selected, the results should be interpreted with caution.
Practical implications – Different practices impact customer satisfaction in different ways, so hoteliers should refine their green strategies when they implement these green practices.
Originality/value – Very few studies have examined the relationship between green practices and customer satisfaction. A gap still exists in specifically what types of green practices affect customer satisfaction and whether different levels of green practices have different impacts on customer satisfaction. This study investigates guests’ actual experiences and fills the above research gap.
Keywords: green hotels, green experiences, customer satisfaction, content analysis, online reviews, TripAdvisor
We discuss common method bias in the context of structural equation modeling employing the partial least squares method (PLS-SEM). Two datasets were created through a Monte Carlo simulation to illustrate the discussion: one contaminated by common method bias, and the other not contaminated. A practical approach is presented for the identification of common method bias based on variance inflation factors generated via a full collinearity test. Our discussion builds on an illustrative model in the field of e-collaboration, with outputs generated by the software WarpPLS. We demonstrate that the full collinearity test is successful in the identification of common method bias with a model that nevertheless passes standard convergent and discriminant validity assessment criteria based on a confirmation factor analysis.
Purpose
– Partial least squares (PLS) path modeling is a variance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) technique that is widely applied in business and social sciences. Its ability to model composites and factors makes it a formidable statistical tool for new technology research. Recent reviews, discussions, and developments have led to substantial changes in the understanding and use of PLS. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper aggregates new insights and offers a fresh look at PLS path modeling. It presents new developments, such as consistent PLS, confirmatory composite analysis, and the heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations.
Findings
– PLS path modeling is the method of choice if a SEM contains both factors and composites. Novel tests of exact fit make a confirmatory use of PLS path modeling possible.
Originality/value
– This paper provides updated guidelines of how to use PLS and how to report and interpret its results.
Online reviews have become irreplaceable product/service information for many consumers. However, not all consumer reviews are deemed to be helpful. Drawing upon expectation-confirmation theory and the attribute-based model of consumer decision-making, this study investigates the role of service attributes and the moderating role of service category in the prediction of extremely positive and extremely negative ratings helpfulness. This study uses latent semantic analysis and regression analysis using a sample of 490 extremely negative and 3757 extremely positive ratings of hotels from TripAdvisor.com. Results show that some product attributes discussed in consumer reviews are particularly important in the determination of the helpfulness of consumer reviews associated with extreme ratings. Findings also suggest the moderating role of service category (i.e. hotel stars) in the relationship between hotel attributes and extreme ratings helpfulness. This study stresses the importance of service attributes and classification in the evaluation of extremely positive and extremely negative ratings helpfulness. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
In response to the increasing ubiquity of social media platforms, improved consumer choice, and technological progress, the importance of consumer-generated content (CGC) continues to grow for organizations marketing their destinations, products, and services to tourists. Yet, despite the importance tourists place on CGC and information shared via social media, there remains a lack of academic focus in this area. To address this gap, we use a rigorous multi-step scale development procedure to create a scale centered on understanding the importance consumers attach to social media sharing (ISMS) from a tourists' perspective. Studies conducted across different contexts (Turkey and Scotland), comprising 1183 participants, were used to validate the newly developed ISMS scale. The scale indicates internal consistency and reliability, alongside construct and predictive validity. Directions for future research and the practical implications of the newly developed ISMS scale are discussed by way of conclusion.
Over the last years, the lodging industry started to implement a wide spectrum of green practices to mitigate its pressure on the environment and to respond to the growing consumers' environmental concerns. Recently, scholars' attention to guest perception of hotels green practices has been grown. This paper through a PLS-SEM analysis, presents the results of a survey targeted to the guests of an ecolabel-awarded hotel, investigating how consumers perceive the actions implemented by hotels to reduce their environmental impacts. The study provides hotel managers with insights from guests staying in green hotels. The main objectives are to explore how guests perceive "green hotel" practices and to test the relationship between guest perceptions of hotel green practices and behavioral intentions. Additionally, the impact of green practices in determining a specific loyalty towards green hotels has been tested. Finally, the study investigates the role of guest satisfaction as a mediator for guest loyalty. Results of this study supported the research hypotheses showing that customers positively recognize the hotels' environmental commitment, with a significant influence on guest satisfaction and loyalty. Findings also suggest that guest who experienced the stay in a green hotel are more likely to develop a specific loyalty toward the hotels implementing green practices. Implications, limitations and future lines of research are also provided.
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the impact of cultural specificity on hotel’s online reviews and ratings.
Design/methodology/approach
Using Hofstede’s scale of cultural differences, it analyzes 1,821 comments about the Catalonia Sagrada Familia Hotel across 77 countries. Logistic regression is used for data analysis.
Findings
It is found that detailed reviews tend to be provided by the guests who belong to a low-power distance culture, are collectivistic, are masculine, have a low uncertainty avoidance, are long-term orientated or are indulgent. On the other hand, the customers who tend to deviate from the prior average ratings come from high-power distance societies, are individualists, are feminists, belong to a high uncertainty avoidance culture, are long-term oriented or are indulgent.
Originality/value
These findings extend the hospitality management literature and potentially help the hotel managers to better understand their customers’ behavior in a web-based environment.
Purpose
This study aims to present a state-of-the art review on information and communication technology (ICT) research in hospitality and tourism published between 2014 and 2017.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 288 full-length articles from eight top-tier hospitality and tourism journals were gathered by harnessing a systematic literature search approach. Subsequently, the authors used a qualitative content analysis to review, analyse and assign all included articles into a framework with six consumer-related and five supplier-related research streams.
Findings
In terms of volume (i.e. the amounts and ratios of ICT research in top-tier journals by publication year) and variety (i.e. the diversity of research topics), a significant progression of ICT research in hospitality and tourism is observed. However, some old and new knowledge gaps are still inadequately addressed, thus requiring scholars and practitioners to conduct additional research in the future.
Practical implications
The accumulation of knowledge and actionable clues in this study is expected to keep practitioners updated with the overwhelming volume of ICT research.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by accelerating the accumulation of knowledge on research topics and setting forth an agenda for future research. The findings also complement prior literature reviews by providing an overview of how knowledge on ICT research in hospitality and tourism has progressed since 2014.
Purpose
This paper aims to examine consumers’ behaviors toward personalized services offered by branded mobile apps in the food service industry by applying privacy calculus theory and technology acceptance model (TAM). Further, this research identified the moderating role of technology anxiety.
Design/methodology/approach
An online survey was carried out to investigate the role of personalization on continuance intention toward branded mobile apps. In total, 348 valid responses were analyzed to test hypotheses using structural equation modeling.
Findings
The results show that personalization had significantly affected perceived benefit, perceived risk and perceived ease of use. Perceived benefit had positive effects on perceived value of disclosure, but perceived risk did not affect perceived value of disclosure. Perceived value of disclosure and perceived ease of use were linked to trust. Trust, in turn, positively affected intentions to use mobile apps. With regard to the moderating effect of technology anxiety, it had a significant moderating impact on the relationship between personalization and perceived risk. However, it did not moderate the relationship between personalization and perceived benefit.
Practical implications
The findings of this study could provide useful theoretical and practical implications related to the successful implementation of mobile marketing.
Originality/value
This study proposes the integrated model of privacy calculus theory and the TAM for deeper understanding of the customers’ responses toward personalization of branded mobile apps.
Purpose
This study aims to adopt a cognitive heuristic approach to investigate the interaction effect of a message source characteristic (reviewer expertise [RE]) and two message structure characteristics (review rating consistency [RC] and review valence [RV]) on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 242 university students and were analyzed by three-way analysis of variance through a 2 × 2 factorial experiments using a simulated hotel review page on TripAdvisor.
Findings
Results show a three-way interaction effect of RE, RC and RV on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews. The main effects of the three factors are also determined. Higher perceived credibility scores are found for negative reviews, reviews written by experts and reviews with a consistent rating.
Research limitations/implications
This study adopts an experimental approach and is the first to investigate the three-way interactions of message source and message structure characteristics of online hotel reviews. Data were collected from students in a university in Hong Kong. Results may not be generalizable to other markets.
Practical implications
Results suggest that reviews written by experts have higher perceived credibility. Hotels should pay attention to the content of online reviews and the expertise level of reviewers. Efforts should be exerted to create positive experiences for hotel guests that motivate expert reviewers to write positive reviews. Note that negative reviews have higher perceived credibility than positive ones. Hotels should promptly address negative reviews and provide professional responses to reviewers. Platform operators of user-generated content (UGC) should create well-defined reviewer profiles that can serve as cues that communicate the different expertise of reviewers.
Originality/value
This study is the first to test the three-way interaction effect of RE, RC and RV on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews. Results provide recommendations to hotels and UGC operators and enable them to benefit from emerging UGC usage.
The purpose of this study is to empirically test a model that examines the roles of offline activities and customer value creation on tourists’ continuance use of online travel communities (OTCs). Hypotheses were tested through a sample of 251 respondents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). SmartPLS structural equation modelling was used to test the structural model. Results indicated that offline activities significantly influence hedonic and social values, while this support was not found with functional value. Similarly, while offline activities positively influence continuance usage intention, no positive relationship was established between offline activities and recommendation intention. Additionally, the three dimensions of customer value creation positively influenced continuance usage intention. This study suggests that in planning offline activities, managers of OTCs must understand the dynamics of customer value creation in order to enhance social bonds among members and continuous usage of the OTC.
KeywordsOffline activitiesSocial presenceCustomer value creationContinuous usage intention
The issue of fake online reviews is increasingly relevant due to the growing importance of online reviews to
consumers and the growing frequency of deceptive corporate practices. It is, therefore, necessary to be able to
detect fake online reviews. An experiment with 1041 respondents allowed us to create two pools of reviews (fake
and truthful) and compare them for psycholinguistic deception cues. The resulting automated tool accounted for
review valence and incentive and detected deceptive reviews with 81% accuracy. A follow-up experiment with
407 consumers showed that humans have only a 57% accuracy of detection, even when a deception mindset is
activated with information on cues of fake online reviews. Therefore, micro-linguistic automated detection can
be used to filter the content of reviewing websites to protect online users. Our independent analysis of reviewing
websites confirms the presence of dubious content and, therefore, the need to introduce more sophisticated
filtering approaches.
A model is proposed which expresses consumer satisfaction as a function of expectation and expectancy disconfirmation. Satisfaction, in turn, is believed to influence attitude change and purchase intention. Results from a two-stage field study support the scheme for consumers and nonconsumers of a flu inoculation.
Social Q&A communities are becoming increasingly popular, but literature on users' continued participation is still relatively limited. Based on theory of planned behavior, this paper aims to answer two research questions: (1) what are the factors that motivate users to continuously participate in online social Q&A communities? (2) How do the factors differ across lurkers, askers and answerers? An online survey was performed on a Chinese social Q&A community. And motivational factors are selected from three perspectives: psychological, social and functional. Results indicate that commitment, shared language and shared vision have positive influence on both lurkers' and answerers' attitude towards continued participation. Concerning the functional dimension, hypotheses about influence of network externalities on users' perceived usefulness are partially supported. And about the psychological dimension, motivations differ greatly between lurkers and answerers.
Online consumer reviews offer an unprecedented amount of information for consumers to evaluate services
before purchase. We use the dual process theory to investigate consumer perceptions about information helpfulness
(IH) in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) contexts. Results highlight that popularity signals, two-sided
reviews, and expert sources (but not source trustworthiness) are perceived as helpful by consumers to assess
service quality and performance. Although two-sided reviews exercise a significant influence on perceived IH,
their influence on purchase intention was indirectly mediated by IH. IH predicts purchase intention and partially
mediates the relationship between popularity signals, source homophily, source expertise, and purchase intention.
Purpose
This study aims to identify factors affecting tourists’ intention of using travel apps installed in their smartphones.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire was developed largely based on the available scales in the published literature. A total of 389 participants responded to the survey, out of which 343 valid responses were obtained for statistical analysis.
Findings
Significant predictors of smartphone app usage intention included performance expectancy, social influence, price saving, perceived risk, perceived trust and prior usage habits. Usage behavior was largely mediated by usage intention, except in the case of habits. Contrary to the expectation, factors such as hedonistic motivation, facilitating conditions or effort expectancy did not impact usage intention or behavior.
Practical implications
The study gives app developers vital cues on tourist expectations from the apps. Oftentimes, developers tend to focus entirely on the material utility of their apps, neglecting every other factor influencing use. One particular implication is that despite tourism being a hedonistic activity, travel app usage behavior is not a hedonistic activity.
Originality/value
This is one of the few studies to examine adoption of smartphone travel apps in an emerging economy context by using extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology framework with additional constructs.
Purpose
With the emergence of mobile devices, factors such as interaction and ubiquity have become increasingly important in the use of social media networks. However, regarding hotel guests’ use of social media, knowledge about how those factors contribute to guests’ continued social media use remains limited. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of interaction and ubiquity mediated by trust, benefits and enjoyment on hotel guests’ continued use of social media networks.
Design/methodology/approach
To examine the hypotheses, a self-administered questionnaire was posted by ten UK hotels on their social media pages. A total of 258 usable data were collected and analyzed using partial least squares analysis.
Findings
Two social media characteristics – interaction and ubiquity – influenced hotel guests’ continued use of social media via the mediating variables of trust, benefits and enjoyment.
Originality/value
This study bridges the gap in research regarding intended continued use of social media networks by offering new empirical evidence concerning the determinants of hotel guests’ continued use of social media.
Online consumer reviews (OCRs) have become one of the most helpful and influential information in consumers purchase decisions. However, the proliferation of OCRs has made it difficult for consumers to orientate themselves with the wealth of reviews available. Therefore, it is paramount for online organizations to understand the determinants of perceived information diagnosticity in OCRs. In this study, we investigate consumer perceptions and we adopt the Elaboration Likelihood Model to analyze the influence of central (long, relevant, current, and factual OCRs) and peripheral cues (source credibility, overall ranking scores) on perceived information diagnosticity (PID). We consider the potential moderating effect of consumer involvement, and tested the robustness of the theoretical framework across time.
Based on two surveys carried out in 2011 and in 2016, this study demonstrates the dynamic nature of the antecedents of PID in e-WOM. We found that long reviews are not perceived as helpful, while relevant and current reviews as well as overall ranking scores are perceived as diagnostic information in both samples. The significance of the predicting power of review factuality and source credibility has evolved over time. Both central (review quality dimensions) and peripheral cues (ranking score) were found to influence PID in high-involvement decisions.
STRUCTURED ABSTRACT
Purpose: Structural equation modeling (SEM) depicts one of the most salient research
methods across a variety of disciplines, including hospitality management. While for many
researchers, SEM is equivalent to carrying out covariance-based SEM, recent research
advocates the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) as an
attractive alternative. We systematically examine how PLS-SEM has been applied in major
hospitality research journals with the aim of providing important guidance and, if necessary,
opportunities for realignment in future applications. As PLS-SEM in hospitality research is
still in an early stage of development, critically examining its use holds considerable promise
in order to counteract misapplications which otherwise might reinforce over time.
Methodology: We reviewed all PLS-SEM studies published in six SSCI-indexed hospitality
management journals between 2001 and 2015. Tying in with prior studies in the field, our
review covers reasons for using PLS-SEM, data characteristics, model characteristics, the
evaluation of the measurement models, the evaluation of the structural model, reporting, and
use of advanced analyses.
Findings: Compared to other fields, our results show that several reporting practices are
clearly above standard but still leave room for improvement, particularly regarding the
consideration of state-of-the art metrics for measurement and structural model assessment.
Furthermore, hospitality researchers seem to be unaware of recent extensions of the PLS-SEM
method, which clearly extend the scope of the analyses and help gaining more insights from
the model and the data. As a result of this PLS-SEM application review in studies this
research presents guidelines on how to accurately use the method. These guidelines are
important for the hospitality management and other disciplines to disseminate and ensure the
rigor of PLS-SEM analyses and reporting practices.
Research limitations/implications: We examined only articles published in SSCI-indexed
hospitality journals and did not include any journals indexed in other databases. That is, while
our research focused on the top-tier hospitality management journals, future research may
widen the scope by considering hospitality management-related studies from other disciplines,
such as tourism research or general management.
Value of the paper: Our study contributes to the literature by providing hospitality
researchers with updated guidelines for PLS-SEM use. Based on a systematic review of
current practices in the hospitality literature, we identify critical methodological issues when
choosing and using the PLS-SEM. Our guidelines allow to improve future PLS-SEM studies
and we offer recommendations for using recent advances of the method.
The statistical tests used in the analysis of structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error are examined. A drawback of the commonly applied chi square test, in addition to the known problems related to sample size and power, is that it may indicate an increasing correspondence between the hypothesized model and the observed data as both the measurement properties and the relationship between constructs decline. Further, and contrary to common assertion, the risk of making a Type II error can be substantial even when the sample size is large. Moreover, the present testing methods are unable to assess a model's explanatory power. To overcome these problems, the authors develop and apply a testing system based on measures of shared variance within the structural model, measurement model, and overall model.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the structural relationships among students’ expectation, perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and continuance intention to use digital textbooks in middle school, based on Bhattacherjee’s (2001) expectation-confirmation model. The subjects of this study were Korean middle school students taking an English class taught by a digital textbook in E middle school, Seoul. Data were collected via a paper-and-pencil-based questionnaire with 17 items; 137 responses were analyzed. The study found that (a) the more expectations of digital textbooks are satisfied, the more likely students are to perceive enjoyment and usefulness of digital textbooks, (b) satisfaction plays a mediating role in linking expectation, perceived enjoyment and usefulness, and continuance intention to use digital textbooks, (c) perceived usefulness and satisfaction have a direct and positive influence on continuance intention to use digital textbooks, and (d) perceived enjoyment has a non-significant influence on continuance intention to use digital textbooks with middle school students. Based on these findings, the implications and recommendations for future research are presented.
The purpose of this study is to propose a unified model integrating the technology acceptance model (TAM), task fit technology (TTF) model, MOOCs features and social motivation to investigate continuance intention to use MOOCs. A sample of 252 participants in China that have already used MOOCs took part in this study. Structural equation modeling implemented via partial least squares (PLS) is conducted to test the research hypotheses. The results show that research framework for integrating the TAM for the adoption and TTF model for utility provides a more comprehensive understanding of the behaviors related to this context: (1) perceived usefulness and attitude are critical to the continuance intention to use MOOCs; (2) perceived usefulness is a significant mediator of the effects of perceived ease of use, task-technology fit, reputation, social recognition and social influence on continuance intention; (3) perceived ease of use, task-technology fit, reputation, social recognition and social influence are found to play important roles in predicting continuance intention; (4) individual-technology fit, task-technology fit, and openness affect the perceived ease of use; (5) unexpectedly, perceived ease of use and social influence have no significant effect on attitude, and individual-technology and openness do not affect perceived usefulness.
Purpose
This paper aims to propose and test a modified TAM model for the social media networks (SMNs) in the luxury hotel context, integrating satisfaction and continued usage intention, using a mixed method approach. SMNs have revolutionized the way people communicate, search for information, and share experiences. The technology acceptance model is the predominant theory for researching technology acceptance; however, there is a gap in identifying and testing context-specific constructs.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a mixed-method approach. The researchers conducted 16 interviews and 258 questionnaires with luxury hotel guests. Following the collection of data, interviews and questionnaires were analyzed using thematic and partial least square analysis.
Findings
Findings show that accessibility, trust, social influence and perceived benefits influence perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, which affect attitude and satisfaction and ultimately continued usage intentions. Findings also reveal that enjoyment, although qualitatively proposed, does not influence luxury hotel guests’ SMNs continued usage intention.
Practical implications
This study suggests that hotel managers have to concentrate their marketing efforts in enhancing SMN’s interaction and increasing the number of positive reviews to retain current customers and acquire new ones. Hotels should also develop effective mobile strategies by adopting mobile social network webs and applications as accessibility becomes more important in today’s marketplace.
Originality/value
Former scholars adopted the approach of proposing external dimensions based on previous research; and thus, did not integrate up-to-date and context-specific variables. Therefore, the present paper uses a new approach by exploring SMN-specific dimensions and testing them in the luxury hotel context.
This research aims to develop and test a theory-based model that empirically investigates the antecedents of consumers’ continued usage behavior intentions toward mobile hotel booking (MHB) technology. The proposed model was tested via structural equation modeling (SEM) by using data collected from 396 MHB users. Among the investigated factors, utilitarian and hedonic value had significant impacts on users’ continued usage intentions. Furthermore, perceived risk, subjective norm and innovativeness significantly influenced utilitarian and hedonic value; also, perceived ease of use had a significant impact on utilitarian value. This study offers important theoretical contributions, as it provides valuable information to researchers in developing and testing related theories. In addition, the study brings clear practical implications to hotel operators, online travel agencies (OTAs), and hospitality technology vendors in developing effective marketing strategies to increase the continued usage level of MHB users.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to propose and test an extended version of technology acceptance model (TAM) to examine consumers’ acceptance of radio frequency identification (RFID) cashless payment systems in the hospitality industry.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive structural model was developed by adding two additional constructs to original TAM, namely, self-efficacy and perceived risk. A self-administered online questionnaire was used to collect the data of the study from 305 respondents in the USA. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to validate the measurement model and structural equation modeling analysis was performed to test the proposed model.
Findings
Study results indicated that self-efficacy was significantly related to perceived ease of use. In addition, perceived risk significantly negatively influenced perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Study results further illustrated that perceived ease of use had a significant impact on perceived usefulness and both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness were significantly associated with intention to use.
Practical implications
Study findings provide significant practical implications for US hospitality operators and technology vendors for identifying factors affecting users’ acceptance of RFID cashless payment systems in the hospitality industry.
Originality/value
By extending TAM, this study is one of the first studies to investigate RFID cashless payment system acceptance in the hospitality industry.