Study on Online User Generated Reviews on Hospitality Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

World Wide Web (www) has enabled more efficient ways of communicating. Among all the benefits received by www, access to very large amounts of data can be considered as one of the most important benefits. Users tend to seek others’ opinions (shared ideas), when it comes to decision making. In hotel and tourism industry, users may often look for others’ ideas before actually visiting a hotel/ resort or a tourist destination. With the remarkable rise of social media platforms, there is no scarcity of users’ feedback regarding their experiences they had at a particular tourist destination. There are many websites that allow travelers to share their ideas. Travelers are given a chance to review a hotel or a resort by posting a description about their experiences and also, rate the hotel or the resort, for example on a five-point Likert scale. New travelers can read these texts or ratings to get a judgment on the hotel or resort before actually they visit it. Hence, it is important to check the consistency between the review and the star rating given by a reviewer because when there are time constraints, users can quickly check the opinion based on star rating. This study aims to assess the consistency between the review and the star rating using user generated reviews available on TripAdvisor.com. Results suggest that there is a weak consistency between reviews and ratings.