The Factors Affecting Writing Reviews in Hotel Websites

Abstract

We aim to understand the people's motivation for writing the reviews in order to better explain drivers of WOM activities in the online channel for the successful implementation of the hotel marketing. For this purpose, we choose one of the popular tourist destinations: Paris. We collect data for empirical analysis from one of the biggest online hotel reservation website. Our analysis reveals that higher rating and lower price increases the propensity to write reviews. However, while the extreme rating and star score and star rating does not have any effect on the propensity to write a review. We have also found the evidence for the negative effect of larger room size on the propensity to write a review. These results imply that satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction increases people's motivation more for writing reviews in hotel websites. We briefly discuss the managerial implications of results. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the 8th International Strategic Management Conference