The Impact of Content Characteristics of Online Reviews on Travellers’ Hotel Booking Intention

Abstract

Since the internet provides an ideal platform for sharing and distributing information, online consumer reviews have become an important source of information to travellers in recent years. Consumers now have wide opportunity and ability to post positive or negative consumption-related experiences and evaluations for any interested party to review. Much of the existing researches focus on identifying the causal relationship between online reviews and travellers’ hotel booking intentions but sheds less light on identifying the individual impact of different content characteristics of online reviews on hotel booking intention separately. Therefore, this study mainly focuses on identifying how the content attributes: Usefulness, Reviewer Expertise, Timeliness, Volume, Valence, Comprehensiveness and Anonymity of online reviews affect travellers’ hotel booking intention. The sample consists of 384 inbound travellers visited Sri Lanka and the judgmental sampling method was applied. To achieve the proposed research objective, the quantitative research method was adopted and data were gathered through self-administered structured questionnaires from the inbound travellers visited Sri Lanka. Collected data were analysed using SPSS package and basic descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and stepwise regression test were run on data to find out the answer for the research question. Consequently, the findings revealed that usefulness of online reviews, valence of online reviews and timeliness of online reviews have positive and significant impact on hotel booking intention. Further, usefulness of online reviews is the most influential content characteristic of online reviews which has the strongest predicting power on hotel booking intention of travellers. Hospitality practitioners can enhance their consumer review management by applying the recommendations provided based on the findings of this study