Investigating the effectiveness of helpful reviews and reviewers in hotel industry

Abstract

With the growth of e-commerce, online consumer reviews have become important attributes that influence purchasing decisions. Especially, hotel industry has strongly influenced by online reviews due that most tourists cannot experience all hotels personally and the service levels among hotels are very different. However, the flood of online consumer reviews has caused information overload, making it difficult for consumers to choose reliable reviews. Therefore, helpful remarks of hotel review should potentially have strong influence on users. Previous research focused on how to predict the helpful scores of reviews, but it has not explored the influence of reviews marked with helpfulness. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the helpful reviews and reviewers who contribute many reviews really have effects on the marks hotel received. With analysis of reviews contributed in Tripadvisor.com for three hundred hotels scattered in ten cities of U.S., this study found both reviewer contribution, and helpful review has a positive effect on marks of hotels. Moreover, the research also discovered that the helpfulness of reviews is negatively relates to the ratings. Also, the research found that the standard deviation of review mark is positively relates to hotel ranks.