Environmental discourse in hotel online reviews: a big data analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate if there is a trend in online consumers’ environmental discourse, and whether online consumers’ environmental discourse differs across different types of online review platforms, i.e., transaction-based vs. community-based platforms. To achieve this purpose, first we define the concept of online consumers’ environmental discourse and operationalize the measures of online consumers’ environmental discourse presence and depth. Second, we retrieve more than 5.5 million online reviews related to hotels located in leading tourism destinations in the Americas and Europe, over the period 2003–2018. The online reviews, collected and analyzed using big data analytical techniques, are sourced from two different types of platforms: Booking.com and Tripadvisor. We find that while environmental awareness (i.e., the presence of online environmental discourse) is relatively high but declining over time, the depth of the environmental discourse is rather marginal but increasing over time. We also observe that both the presence and depth of environmental discourse, as well as other text analytics (subjectivity, diversity, length, sentiment, readability), related to the environmental discourse differ across platforms. The relevant theoretical contributions and managerial implications for tourism and hospitality research are also discussed.