How do consumer reviews on TripAdvisor affect consumer decision making when booking an

Abstract

Purpose – The development of online consumer review websites has allowed electronic word-of-mouth communications to develop. Therefore consumers have access to more information in the internet than ever before. The purpose of this study is to discover how positive and negative reviews and the credibility of the review/ reviewer on TripAdvisor affect consumer decision making when booking an international hotel.

Methodology – The triangulation method of research was adopted by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research in the form of an experiment and questionnaire. Purposive sampling allowed five participants to be chosen for the experiment and a sample of 50 for the questionnaire, thus enabling the most accurate representation of the population to be obtained.

Findings and Analysis – The research found that negative reviews have an immediate impact on the consumer, thus affecting them more than positive reviews. Review credibility is assessed through studying the consistency between large amounts of reviews. Consumers are likely to use a combination of consumer-generated and marketer-generated reviews when booking a hotel. The affect that TripAdvisor review have on consumer decision making is very strong, especially the effect of negative reviews.

Limitations and Further Research – Factors that limited the research were the types of sampling methods used, the use of simple questions and participant bias. Further areas for research were discussed to overcome these limitations by using probability sampling to ensure the findings are more representative, alteration of question styles and attempting to minimise bias by closer controlling of the experiment variables.

Keywords – TripAdvisor, word-of-mouth communication, electronic word-of-mouth communication, positive word-of-mouth, negative word-of-mouth, online reviews.