Taking the Conversation Offline?: The Impact of Response Strategies on Potential Hotel Guests: An Abstract

Abstract

Online reviews have proliferated in recent years – especially in the tourism sector. For potential customers, they present a fast and convenient way to compare and evaluate service providers (Sparks, So, and Bradley 2016). Accordingly, the consequences and effects of online reviews on future clients have sparked interest in the research community for a while (e.g., Cheung, Lee, and Rabjohn 2008; Kwok and Xie 2016; Mauri and Minazzi 2013). While a vast body of research has investigated the effects of online reviews for consumers, this paper studies the effect of different response strategies and its impact on potential customers’ evaluations such as trust and subsequently booking intention.

In study 1 (n = 399), we test four different response strategies that hotels and restaurants can use to reply to negative online in an experimental setting. We assigned participants to one of four conditions (hotel response: explanation, sending a private message, explanation and sending a private message, no reply). We incorporated the hotel response directly under the review to create the illusion of a real online review. The control group only saw the online review with no reply. We find that that an extensive response strategy has the strongest influence on trust. Sending a private message only might be beneficial in dealing with the immediate service recovery (i.e., the customer who wrote the review) but it does not lead to trust inferences for third party stakeholder (i.e., online review readers). Moreover, in line with existing literature, no reply did not produce any favorable inferences.

In study 2 (n = 801), we additionally manipulate the severity of the service failure described in the online review and show that this is an important boundary condition. We applied a 2 (severity: medium; severe) × 4 (Hotel response: explanation, private message, explanation and private message, no reply) between-subject design. We used the same stimulus material from study 1 for the medium case. Additionally, we altered the hotel review for the severe case. Study 2 corroborates the findings of study 1. All three reply strategies increased the trust towards the hotel. Trust in turn, positively affected booking intention. The combined approach (explanation and private message) had the strongest effect on trust in general. However, results of the moderated mediation indicate that this type of recovery strategy is particularly favorable in case of a medium service failure while its effect is buffered in case of a severe service failure. The findings of study 2 therefore suggest the effect of recovery efforts (i.e., replying to online reviews) are more fruitful and pronounced for cases that are not severe whereas the effect diminishes in case of severe service failures.