Effect of Customer Reviews and Averaged Ratings on Hotel Reservation Decisions: A Qualitative Investigation
In a recent study, researchers delved into the role of user-generated reviews and ratings in the decision-making process of booking hotels on Online Travel Agency (OTA) websites. The study, conducted using Economic and Organizational Psychology (Ewom) as a theoretical framework, provides valuable insights into how these pieces of information shape customer perceptions and influence their choices.
The research reveals that positive sentiment scores in reviews are strongly associated with perceived and interactive hotel service attributes such as environment, room quality, and staff interaction. These attributes contribute significantly to customer satisfaction during the deliberation phase, as travellers rely on detailed and sentiment-rich reviews to evaluate their options before booking.
Moreover, the study demonstrates that interactive service attributes, including communication and personalised interactions described in reviews, have a particularly strong positive impact on user sentiment. This underscores the importance of these elements in the decision-making process.
Qualitative analyses of online hotel reviews also uncover nuanced insights into the customer experience, going beyond just ratings. This helps prospective guests make more confident decisions by understanding not only quantitative scores but also contextual information such as service quality, hotel environment, and personalised experiences mentioned by previous customers.
The findings of this study emphasise that reviews and ratings serve as crucial information sources during the deliberation phase, guiding travellers through both cognitive and emotional decision processes. These insights can help hotels tailor their services and marketing strategies to enhance the interactive and perceived attributes valued by customers.
In summary, the qualitative study deepens our understanding of how reviews influence consumer deliberation by highlighting which hotel attributes matter most and how positive interactions enhance overall satisfaction, thereby informing booking decisions. The study's findings are consistent with related research in the field and may contribute to improving the design and functionality of OTA websites to better facilitate user decision-making in hotel bookings.
Furthermore, the study provides insights into why and how travellers use user-generated information like reviews and ratings when booking hotel rooms on OTA websites. These findings may have implications for the marketing strategies of hotels and OTAs, offering insights into the factors that influence user decision-making in the hotel-booking process.
- In addition to facility analysis, the study underlines the importance of media analytics, such as facial coding and sentiment analysis, in understanding user behavior and preferences reflected in online reviews and ratings.
- The implications of the study stretch beyond hotelbookings, as data-and-cloud-computing techniques in technology can be leveraged to analyze such user-generated content in a broader context, providing valuable insights for various sectors that rely on customer feedback.
