Keywords

1 Introduction

The prevalence of Internet usage has changed the usual pattern for tourists to search, acquire and exchange tourism information. Consumer-generated contents in the form of blogs, photos, videos, and reviews, play a critical role in influencing consumer decision making [1, 2]. Contrary to contents supplied by official hotel booking sites and online travel agencies, consumer-generated content is created, initiated, circulated, and used by consumers [3].

With ever-growing activities on the Internet, the way in which individuals treat information from the Internet has shifted from passively searching and consuming information to actively sharing content and interacting with others. Online review platform contains huge data that supply the most convenient and accessible channel for individuals to compare the self to others.

While the literature about using the online review as references in travel planning is developing swiftly, the understanding of how online reviews influence tourist emotion and decision at the post-trip stage is limited. Most previous hotel marketing studies about online review focused on how information affects consumer decisions and behavior at the pre-trip stage. Yet, whether viewing other individual’s experiences after the hotel stay will affect revisit intention has not been investigated. Without the scholarship that recognizes review processing by tourists at the post-trip stage, hotel and tourism management studies cannot sufficiently comprehend the optimized approach to utilize electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) for marketing purposes. Considering the potential social consequences and influence that accrue to consumer-generated content on online review platform, a study exploring online review’s effect on people who have finished the hotel stay is highly expedient. To this end, this study examines whether encountering travel experiences shared on online review platform by other users with disparity in the cost of same accommodation after a trip will cause regret and alter the intention to revisit from a retrospective point of view based on social comparison theory? The results of this study could be beneficial to the hotelier and media platform operator in utilizing social media marketing more wisely (e.g., how to manage their past review on online review platform, different contents to display to a user who has used the booked hotel room).

2 Literature Review and Hypothesis

2.1 Feeling Regret and Intention to Visit a Hotel Again

Hotel rooms as a sporadically purchased service can be intervened by the choice of tourist destination besides the close relationship with variety seeking. Thus, when an individual is dissatisfied with a hotel, the chances of returning to the same hotel is small even if he or she visits the same destination, in contrast with restaurants (i.e., a frequently purchased service) that usually will be given a second chance when there is a dissatisfactory experience [4]. Since the hotel normally only has “one-shot” to impress the customer, avoiding any regret feeling to occur during the whole experience seems particularly important.

Regret arises when an individual compares the decision outcome with a counterfactual outcome [4], and the person realized the situation could have been better if different actions were taken [5]. Having information about the forgone outcome serves as the source to regret, and with knowing the better option is available, consumers will encounter even greater regrets [6]. Research has found that regret links with switching behavior and negative word-of-mouth directly [4, 5, 7, 8], as individual will abandon the choice that they remembered as being successful/satisfied due to regret. Therefore, we hypothesize that when facing the decision of choosing a hotel to stay, individual will be likely to switch away from the previous hotel that has caused them into feeling regret.

H1: Regret is negatively associated with intention to stay in a hotel again.

2.2 Social Comparison and Online Review Viewing

Comparison is proved to be a basic human motive, with substantial theories of social psychology concerning comparison in previous literature [9]. In social comparison theory, people often use others as a referent to obtain information about their performance [10]. Festinger’s original theory applied first to the evaluation of abilities and opinions, where many empirical studies have found the influence of comparison behavior in other individual aspects [11]. The perceptions of relative standing after comparing to others can produce many outcomes, for instance, a person’s feelings of well-being (i.e., subjective well-being), self-concept, and level of aspiration [12]. Under some circumstances, the social comparison may induce threatening information to the self and such a situation is hardly avoidable.

According to the well-proved homophily and similarity-attraction theories [13], many studies have suggested that when prospective consumer are viewing online review for making accommodation decision, they tend to take the reviewers’ characteristics (e.g., demographic information and personal preferences) into account other than the review content and give more value to those reviews written by surrogates who share either demographic or preference similarities with the individual [14, 15]. Furthermore, this consideration is powerful enough to influence the hotel selection process [14]. Unfortunately, previous research only focuses on the comparison that happens prior to the initiation of actual travel.

In day-to-day life, one would look at others as a reference point, seeking for information to lessen the uncertainty about one’s ability or the utility of goods so that dislike and punishment can be refrained from [16]. In consumer behavior studies, as Calder and Bumkrant [17] stated, the major source of value is not coming from the product itself but the consumer’s belief about other’s perception of him/her.

In Argo and colleague’s research [18], they identified five relevant factors of comparison in a social environment, containing the comparison target (i.e., the importance of comparison referent), comparison discrepancy (i.e., performance differences), comparison direction (i.e., upward or downward), nature of compare information (i.e., subjective or objective) and the perceived attainability (i.e., likelihood to reach the compared level). Apply this framework in hotel context, following five questions might occur to a hotel guest when viewing review from others after staying in a hotel: (1) is the comparison target on the online review platform relevant or irrelevant; (2) how significant are the cost and quality discrepancy between other’s experience and one’s own; (3) whether the individual spent more (upward comparison) or less (downward comparison) than others during their stay; (4) whether the nature of comparison information is coming from subjective (podcasting from an individual user) or objective source (video posted by the hotel official account), and (5) whether oneself can obtain the same level of enjoyment from staying in the same hotel next time?

The current study chooses comparison discrepancy to be investigated in an upward comparison direction, thus the effect of regret can be investigated, with an important comparison target (i.e., a friend), to see if the degree of discrepancy (i.e., large or small) would lead to distinct hotel booking intention. The form of discrepancy chosen to be tested was the amount that customer paid for the hotel room, by reason of the difference in monetary amount is easy for experiment participants to interpret and distinguish between upward or downward comparison. Argo and colleagues [18] came to the conclusion based on the experimental evidence that when participants were given more (rather than less) harsh upward social comparison information, they were more depressed. Being outperformed by a large (rather than small) degree appears to be more threatening. Since larger comparison discrepancy have larger implications on people’s emotion and self-evaluation, we predict that:

H2: Compare with a small comparison discrepancy, a large comparison discrepancy results in stronger regret.

Taken the above-mentioned rationales together with the relationship between regret and intention, the following conditional hypothesis is formulated:

H3: Regret mediates the negative effect of comparison discrepancy on intention to stay in the hotel again.

Figure 1 illustrates the hypotheses in this study.

Fig. 1.
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Conceptual model

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3 Methodology

Eighty participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing platform. The experiment in this study used a between-subjects design, where participants were randomly assigned to one of the two scenarios (two conditions) which were with high social comparison discrepancy and low social comparison discrepancy in online review reading experience. The questionnaire used in the experiment was pilot tested and passed in terms of design and language use.

A scenario-based experiment was designed. The participants were first asked to imagine they finished their stay in a hotel standard king room. They paid $240 for the hotel room. The hotel has matched their expectation and they felt satisfied with the room quality and hospitality. They have given the hotel a 5-star rating out of 5 and wrote down some positive comments on the online hotel booking website. When they went back and checked their review, they saw a friend's review for the same hotel and same room type. The participant was then presented with an online review post in the review community interface, incorporate the experience of the same kind of room in the hotel, similar experience but was paid with a lower price. In that review, the friend stated they only paid $225 (in the low social comparison discrepancy condition)/$190 (in the high social comparison discrepancy condition) (see Figs. 2a and 2b). To be noted, participants in both conditions were engaged in an upward social comparison, only with differences in the degree of comparison discrepancy (i.e., price differences of the hotel room paid).

Fig. 2.
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a. Low social discrepancy condition in the experiment. b. High social discrepancy condition in the experiment

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After reading the review in a specified condition, the participants were asked to complete the questionnaire with items listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Questionnaire items
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4 Analyses and Results

Among the 80 participants, 63.8% were male and 58.8% were under 30 years old. The low social comparison condition had 38 participants while the high social comparison condition had 42 participants.

The manipulation was successful as the perceived price differences is significantly higher in the high comparison discrepancy condition than the low comparison discrepancy condition (Mlow-discrepancy = 4.421 vs. Mhigh-discrepancy = 5.071; t(78) = −2.571, p < 0.05, 95% C.I. −1.144 to −0.159). The review used in the scenario reached good believability as the mean score of believability is 5.463 compared to the value of 4 as the neutral perspective (SD = 1.080; t(79) = 12.113, p < 0.001, 95% C.I. 1.223 to 1.690).

Hayes’ [20] PROCESS Model 4 with 10,000 bootstrapped samples was used to test the hypotheses. Table 2 shows the results. Hypothesis 1 is supported as regret is negatively associated with intention to revisit the hotel (b = -–0.205, SE = 0.079, p < 0.05). Hypothesis 2 is also supported as social comparison discrepancy has positive effect on regret (a = 0.862, SE = 0.408, p < 0.05). In hypothesis 3, we hypothesized that regret mediates the effect of social comparison discrepancy on intention. This mediation is confirmed as the bias-corrected bootstrap confidence interval (C.I.) for the indirect effect of social comparison discrepancy on intention (ab = −0.177) does not include zero (−0.440 to −0.003). There was no direct effect of social comparison discrepancy on intention (c’ = 0.346, p = 0.244) and thus it is a full-mediation. In a nutshell, all hypotheses are confirmed.

Table 2. Results of PROCESS Model 4
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5 Discussion and Implications

Many previous studies tried to solve the puzzle of hotel online review used in hotel booking and trip planning, whereas this study looks at hotel review management from an after-stay angle. The current study of social comparison’s impact on intention to revisit adds to the literature and lays the ground for future scholarly effort on online review management at the post-trip stage. To the best understanding of us, this research is the first to consider and test the hypotheses of regret’s mediating role in the social comparison process, specifically towards the effect comparison discrepancy has on the intention to stay in the hotel again.

Findings from this study provide implications not only to hotel marketing strategy on how to manage their past review but also for online review platform to better designing the algorithm of what content to display in the review interface, differentiating a new customer and a customer who has stayed in the hotel. For instance, it is possible for a guest who changed their intention to revisit the hotel after viewing someone else’s review to describe a better experience and engaging in an upward comparison. The result of the positive effect social comparison discrepancy has on regret is consistent with previous findings. This relationship testifies that when the actual outcome of individual choice was compared to the counterfactual outcome and the counterfactual outcome was known to be a better option (upward comparison), the individual will regret their original decision [4,5,6]. Correspond with the hypothesis, the result from the experiment confirmed that regret mediates the negative effect of comparison discrepancy on intention to stay in the hotel again. Without the mediating effect of regret, there was a lack of direct effect of social comparison discrepancy on the intention to stay in the hotel again, indicating the role of regret in the model was paramount.

Online review platforms and hotel management should consider applying better strategy on the review webpage to identify new and old hotel customer hinge on their booking record. Once a review website user is identified as the previous guest of a specific hotel, the display of review should be carefully arranged based on the user’s review and rating, no to bring about a huge contrast (e.g., the difference in room rate paid, welcoming gift, etc.). For instance, reviews and ratings that demonstrated a similar experience should be ranked at the top to strengthen user’s perception, and reviews that showed a distinctly better experience than this user’s experience should be ranked at last. Moreover, if the review revealed the hotel room price, the platform manager should consider concealing this kind of content. Thereby, while this particular customer is viewing others’ reviews, the hotel could minimize the opportunity to stir up the guest’s feeling of regret, and the idea of change his/her review and rating or never visit the hotel again. A successful online review/post management will magnify reviews’ influence and possibly increase retention and positive word of mouth.

6 Limitations and Future Research

This study's results should be viewed in light of certain constraints. First, the prices of the hotel room in the condition were set to be $240, $225, and $190, we do not know if the conclusions were robust against different hotel room rate levels. Future research should examine additional room rate levels and control participants’ income or employment status, to test if the conclusion can apply to all populations without economical consideration. Second, 80 participants recruited in this study are a relatively small number for representing a population as large as the accommodation guests who use online review platform. Moreover, the age distribution of the data was not normal, 58.8% of the respondents were under 30 years old, representing a relatively young population. Therefore, generalizing the findings to the general population needs to be conducted with special caution.

Additional directions of future studies are many and varied. Argo and colleagues [18] identified five relevant factors of comparison in a social environment, namely comparison target, comparison discrepancy, comparison direction, nature of compare information, and the perceived attainability [18]. This exploratory research only looked at one of the factors of social comparison. Future research is needed to investigate the other elements of comparison (e.g., comparison target: friend versus stranger) in the online review context as well as their relationships with hotel consumer’s emotions and perception towards their hotel experience. In addition, Wu and Wang [21] pointed out in their study that consumers who experience other-blame regret would produce more negative word-of-mouth than those who experience self-blame regret. Moreover, consumer’s decisions are subject to social influence. Individual’s expectation of how others would evaluate their decisions possibly depends on whether the context of regret is private (i.e., the negative chosen outcome is found by herself/himself) or public (i.e., the negative chosen outcome is found by others) [21, 22]. It would be interesting to control the nature and the context of regret in the future study looking at regret’s role in affecting review reading emotion and subsequent actions. Multiple experiments featuring different contexts should be conducted to examine the robustness of findings.