Who’s asking? Social platform and research sponsors’ identity biases in guests’ hospitality experience-reviews: a case study of Spanish hotels

ABSTRACT

The study here assesses the systematic variability of service performance assessments in customer reviews placed in alternative online social media platforms in the travel industry as well as responses to the firm’s requests for customer evaluations. The research includes an empirical study conducted by a national (Spanish) hotel chain of nine corporately-owned properties (hotels). Data-analyses were performed of data collected for the nine hotels from TripAdvisor and Booking.com, as well as internal data from the hotel chain’s customer data files. The findings support the general conclusion that hotel reviews on different social media platforms vary in systematic ways. TripAdvisor reviews consistently include the largest share of detractors across all social media platforms in this study, ranging from 11 to 51%. This study contributes useful benchmarks for the relative differences in performances in customer experience assessments across different social media platforms.

这项研究评估了旅游业替代在线社交媒体平台上的客户评论中服务绩效评估的系统可变性,以及对公司客户评估请求的回应. 该研究包括一项由九家企业所有的全国性(西班牙)连锁酒店(酒店)进行的实证研究. 数据分析是从TripAdvisor和Booking.com为九家酒店收集的数据,以及该连锁酒店客户数据文件中的内部数据. 研究结果支持了一个普遍的结论,即不同社交媒体平台上的酒店评论存在系统性差异. 在这项研究中,TripAdvisor的评论在所有社交媒体平台上的批评者比例一直最高,从11%到51%不等. 这项研究为不同社交媒体平台的客户体验评估表现的相对差异提供了有用的基准.

KEYWORDS:

• Branding
• guest
• marketing
• net promoter score
• services
• social media

Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge the contribution of Laura Victoria Bello Urbina, research fellow at University of Navarra for her technical contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).