Online reviews provide additional product information to reduce uncertainty. Hence, consumers often rely on online reviews to form purchase decisions. However, an explosion of online reviews brings ...the problem of information overload to individuals. Identifying reviews containing valuable information from large numbers of reviews becomes increasingly important to both consumers and companies, especially for experience products, such as attractions. Several online review platforms provide a function for readers to rate a review as “helpful” when it contains valuable information. Different from consumers, companies want to detect potential valuable reviews before they are rated to avoid or promote their negative or positive influence, respectively. Using online attraction review data retrieved from TripAdvisor, we conduct a two-level empirical analysis to explore factors that affect the value of reviews. We introduc a negative binomial regression model at a review level to explore the effects of the actual reviews. Subsequently, we apply a Tobit regression model at the reviewer level to investigate the effects of reviewer characteristics inferred from properties of historical rating distribution. The empirical analysis results indicate that both text readability and reviewer characteristics affect the perceived value of reviews. These findings have direct implications for attraction managers in their improved identification of potential valuable reviews.
•A novel econometric model is introduced for data analysis.•A dataset comprising reviewer historical information is built.•The effects of reviewers' historical rating distributions are explored.•The effect of text readability is confirmed in attraction reviews.•The study results benefit attraction management.
This paper reviews the published articles on eTourism in the past 20 years. Using a wide variety of sources, mainly in the tourism literature, this paper comprehensively reviews and analyses prior ...studies in the context of Internet applications to tourism. The paper also projects future developments in eTourism and demonstrates critical changes that will influence the tourism industry structure. A major contribution of this paper is its overview of the research and development efforts that have been endeavoured in the field, and the challenges that tourism researchers are, and will be, facing.
•The impacts of cultural values on technology acceptance at national level have been investigated by previous studies, but not at individual level.•The objective is to investigate the impacts of ...cultural values at individual level on the extended TAM by considering technology readiness.•A research framework was developed, and the technology acceptance model was extended from the perspective of hotel employees.•Highlighting long-term benefits of hotel technology such as workload reduction can improve the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use.•Introducing a new hotel technology under a less masculine cultural environment can greatly help hotel employees minimize their discomfort.
The impacts of cultural values on technology acceptance at national level have been investigated by previous studies, but not at individual level. Hence, the research question of the present study is what are the impacts of cultural values at individual level on technology acceptance? The detailed objective is to investigate the impacts of cultural values at individual level on the extended technology acceptance model by considering technology readiness. A research framework was developed, and the technology acceptance model was extended from the perspective of hotel employees. Results showed that highlighting long-term benefits of hotel technology such as workload reduction and performance enhancement can be considered to improve the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In addition, introducing a new hotel technology under a less masculine cultural environment can greatly help hotel employees minimize their discomfort. Accordingly, an effective and successful hotel technology can be achieved.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to review recent work in the robotics literature and identify future opportunities for consumer/tourist experience research in human-robot interactions (HRIs).
...Design/methodology/approach
The paper begins by covering the framework of robotic agent presence and embodiment that are relevant for HRI. Next, the paper identifies future opportunities for hospitality and tourism scholars to undertake consumer/tourist experience research in HRIs.
Findings
The result of this study provided potential directions for advancing theoretical, methodological and managerial implications for tourism experience research in HRI.
Research limitations/implications
Concepts from robotics research are diffusing into a range of disciplines, from engineering to social sciences. These advancements open many unique, yet urgent, opportunities for hospitality and tourism research.
Practical implications
This paper illustrates the speed at which robotics research is progressing. Moreover, the concepts reviewed in this research on robotic presence and embodiment are relevant for real-world applications in hospitality and tourism.
Social implications
Developments in robotics research will transform hospitality and tourism experiences in the future.
Originality/value
This research is one of the early papers in the field to review robotics research and provide innovative directions to broaden the interdisciplinary perspective for future hospitality and tourism research.
In view of the increasing popularity of online reviews and their significant impact on individual buying behavior as well as on the supply side, this study reviewed and analyzed articles related to ...online reviews in tourism and hospitality published in academic journals between 2004 and 2013. Based on a keyword-driven search and a content analysis, 50 articles were identified as relevant and classified into five topics. The findings revealed that (a) more than half of the analyzed articles focus on hotels and apply empirical methods based on secondary data, (b) more attention has been paid to the relationship between online reviews and online buying as well as satisfaction and online management, and (c) opinion mining of online reviews, motivation to post reviews, and the role of reviews are evenly distributed. This paper also discussed significant topical and methodological trends, contributes to an overall understanding of existing research and its limitation.
Despite the growing enthusiasm about social media, empirical research findings suggest that the majority of Internet users are not using consumer-generated media (CGM) for travel planning. Yet little ...is presently known about the relevant factors determining CGM usage for the specific purpose of travel planning. Using an online survey of travel consumers, this study investigates the intention to use consumer-generated media for travel planning by introducing new factors into the conventional TAM and using a partial least squares' estimation. Findings shed light on the differences in terms of the antecedents in this context. While the study demonstrates the theoretical validity and the empirical applicability of the TAM model to the context of CGM usage for travel planning, it goes further to verify the significant roles of distinctive factors like travelers' perceptions of similarity of interest, trustworthiness and enjoyment. Several managerial and research implications emerge.
► Found support for the conventional TAM related constructs in predicting intention. ► Observed differences in study's context regarding the nature of the relationships. ► Hedonic value is most influential in predicting the utilitarian use for trip planning. ► Findings support the appropriateness of the attitude construct in TAM research. ► Perceived similarity of interest wields a strong relationship with trustworthiness.
Dining is an essential tourism component that attracts significant expenditure from tourists. Tourism practitioners need insights into the dining behaviors of tourists to support their strategic ...planning and decision making. Traditional surveys and questionnaires are time consuming and inefficient in capturing the complex dining behaviors of tourists at a large scale. Thus far, the understanding about the dining preferences and opinions of different tourist groups is limited. This article aims to fill the void by presenting a method that utilizes online restaurant reviews and text processing techniques in analyzing the dining behaviors of tourists. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in a case study on international tourists visiting Australia using a large-scale data set of more than 40,000 restaurant reviews made by tourists on 2,265 restaurants. The proposed method can help researchers gain comprehensive insights into the dining preferences of tourists.
The rapid growth in Internet applications in tourism has lead to an enormous amount of personal reviews for travel-related information on the Web. These reviews can appear in different forms like ...BBS, blogs, Wiki or forum websites. More importantly, the information in these reviews is valuable to both travelers and practitioners for various understanding and planning processes. An intrinsic problem of the overwhelming information on the Internet, however, is information overloading as users are simply unable to read all the available information. Query functions in search engines like Yahoo and Google can help users find some of the reviews that they needed about specific destinations. The returned pages from these search engines are still beyond the visual capacity of humans. In this research, sentiment classification techniques were incorporated into the domain of mining reviews from travel blogs. Specifically, we compared three supervised machine learning algorithms of Naïve Bayes, SVM and the character based N-gram model for sentiment classification of the reviews on travel blogs for seven popular travel destinations in the US and Europe. Empirical findings indicated that the SVM and N-gram approaches outperformed the Naïve Bayes approach, and that when training datasets had a large number of reviews, all three approaches reached accuracies of at least 80%.
Travel itineraries are employed in tourism research to study tourist activities for various applications. However, the potentials of such itineraries in providing insights into the activity ...preferences of tourists have not been explored because of the complexity of travel information. In this paper, a new approach based on probabilistic topic modeling with latent Dirichlet allocation is introduced for travel itinerary analysis and representation. Capable of revealing the implicit preferences of tourists, the new approach enables topic modeling to be applied in itinerary analysis. We demonstrate its effectiveness through a case study of outbound travel behavior analysis on a large-scale travel itinerary data set. Activity profiles of various itinerary types at different destinations are revealed. The results are useful for travel and tourism managers in developing travel and tour packages. The general features of the proposed method can be applied into different tourism contexts and travel itinerary formats for wide applications.
•A new method for travel itinerary analysis based on probabilistic topic modeling is introduced.•The method can reveal implicitly tourist activity preferences in complex travel patterns.•A case study of outbound travel behavior demonstrates the effectiveness of the method.•Analyses are carried out on travel itineraries constructed from Foursquare venue check-ins.•Findings provide valuable implications for travel and tour package development.
Despite hospitality and tourism researchers’ recent attempts on examining different aspects of online word-of-mouth WOM, its impact on hotel sales remains largely unknown in the existing literature. ...To fill this void, we conduct a study to empirically investigate the impact of online consumer-generated reviews on hotel room sales. Utilizing data collected from the largest travel website in China, we develop a fixed effect log-linear regression model to assess the influence of online reviews on the number of hotel room bookings. Our results indicate a significant relationship between online consumer reviews and business performance of hotels.
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