How does the COVID-19 pandemic influence tourist rating behaviour? An empirical exploration based on expectation theory

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious consequences to the world economy and the tourism and hospitality industries, which depend on human movement, have been greatly affected. Unlike previous studies that have mainly investigated different focus attributes in online reviews after the COVID-19 pandemic, this study focuses on how such a health crisis affects individual tourists’ rating behaviour. To address the research question, this study collected data from Qunar.com and adopted an interrupted time-series strategy in which the treated observations are set as tourists’ rating behaviour after the pandemic and control observations are set as tourists’ rating behaviour before the pandemic. Our results indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic positively affects tourist ratings for hotels, and such a positive effect is strengthened when tourists focus on health-related issues or travel for business. However, such an influence is weakened if hotels have a high star level. This study offers implications for both academics and practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• online rating
• health-related issues
• travel on business
• hotel star level

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by System Science and Enterprise Development Research Center [grant number Xq21C04]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number YJ202074]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72102157]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72131005]; MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number 1YJC630148].