Examining the negative relationship between length of stay at a hotel and customer satisfaction: Evidence from online customer reviews

Purpose Studies that investigate the length of stay as a predictor of consumer post-purchase behavior are rare despite its importance in efficient hotel management. By analyzing online customer reviews, this study aims to fill this gap in the extant literature on the relationship between length of stay and customer satisfaction level. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected and used online review data on hotels in London for this study. A series of linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the effect of length of stay on customer satisfaction as measured by review ratings. The authors used the Mahalanobis matching approach to confirm the empirical findings. Findings This analysis shows that length of stay is negatively associated with customer satisfaction. Additionally, the authors find that this negative relationship is stronger in high-end hotels than in low-end hotels. Research limitations/implications The research findings contribute to the literature by shedding light on a new stream of research, namely, length of stay. Additionally, the research findings offer novel insights that could help hotel managers understand the trade-off between longer stays and customer satisfaction. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first few studies to show the systematic impact of length of stay on the valence of online review ratings, as well as the moderating effect of hotel levels by analyzing customer online reviews on hotel experiences

Assessing the effect of mobile word-of-mouth on consumers : the physical, psychological and social influences

Mobile technologies enable users to discover and research products anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices allow consumers to create and share content based on physical location, facilitate seamless interactions, and provide context-relevant information that can better satisfy users’ needs and enhance their shopping experience. As consumers increasingly rely on mobile devices to search information and purchase products, they need immediate, updated, informative and credible opinions in concise forms. Meanwhile, marketers face unprecedented opportunities for mobile marketing, making ever important for them to understand the mobile word-of-mouth and its effect on the purchase behaviors of consumers on the mobile platform vs. those on other devices. Drawing from the media richness theory and the principle of compensatory adaptation, study one performs sentiment analysis of online product reviews from both mobile and desktop devices by analyzing over one million customer reviews from Dianping.com. We find that mobile reviews are naturally shorter, contain more adverbs and adjectives, and have smaller readership and less votes of helpfulness. The product ratings from mobile reviews are more polarized yet the average valence of mobile reviews is higher. By comparison, desktop reviews contain more pictures and are rated more helpful. Lastly, pricy products receive more desktop reviews than mobile ones. Study two draws from the construal level theory and posit that WOM from mobile devices reflects closer psychological distances (temporal and social), thus constitutes a lower construal level than that from desktop computers. Using a dataset of over one million product reviews from Dianping.com, we assess the value of online product reviews from mobile devices in comparison with those from the desktop computers. Our findings show that WOM is more helpful when it is socially and temporally closer to the users and this effect is amplified when using mobile devices, which bring the mental construal to a low level and make others’ opinions more relevant. Further, we show that product type moderates the effect of online reviews in that m-WOM is more influential for hedonic products and its value for the utilitarian consumption is the lowest. Study three deploys the observational learning theory to examine the effect of WOM across the mobile and desktop devices on the purchase behavior of online promotional offers. The findings suggest that the effect of WOM on the purchase of promotion offers varies significantly across the platforms, product categories, and discount rates. These findings help better understand the strengths, limitations and the effect of m-WOM as marketers attempt to offer consumers context-sensitive and time-critical promotions through mobile devices and make a significant contribution to the literature on interactive marketing. These studies render meaningful implications for theory development about the role of mobile technologies in marketing and can assist practitioners formulating effective promotional strategies through the electronic channels via mobile and desktop devices

A social commerce investigation of the role of trust in a social networking site on purchase intentions

Trust is a crucial issue in online shopping environments, but it is more important in social commerce platforms due to the salient role of peer-generated contents. This article investigates the relationship between trust in social commerce and purchase intentions and describes a mechanism to explain this relationship. We propose a main and two alternative models by drawing on three concepts: social commerce information seeking, familiarity with the platform, and social presence. The models clarify the mechanisms through which trust, familiarity, social presence, and social commerce information seeking influence behavioral intentions on social commerce platforms. Findings from a survey of Facebook users indicate that trust in a social networking site (SNS) increases information seeking which in turn increases familiarity with the platform and the sense of social presence. Moreover, familiarity and social presence increase purchases intentions. Findings indicate that the main model fits the data better than the alternative ones. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed

The integrative effects of promotion attributes : implications for effective promotion design

Promotion attributes, such as giveaways, time limitation and exclusivity, are commonly studied separately. Previous studies may focus on how individual attributes (e.g. time pressure or price discounts) affect sales, but seldom consider the integrative effect of them. As individual attributes are often found to have a bilateral effect (both positive and negative) on sales, in this thesis, we explore how different attributes can be aligned with each other and integrated with different level of brand strength according to fit logic. That is how promotion elicits sales and generates word-of-mouth impact in terms of the configuration of promotional attributes and brand strength. We conduct a field study of 625 online promotion campaigns and discover several effective configurations of promotion attributes through qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Based on the configurations we have found, we hypothesize that strong brands should adopt non-monetary promotion, while weak brands should adopt monetary promotion; exclusivity and time limitation should be kept mutually exclusive in a single promotion for sales stimulation. Three experiments are designed to test these hypotheses. Focusing on the integrative effect of promotional attributes allows researchers to have a holistic view of causally relevant conditions for designing an effective promotion. This study has important theoretical implications that can facilitate marketers’ understanding and predictions of deal recipients’ responses to promotions

THE IMPACTS OF REGULATORY FOCUS AND TEMPORAL DISTANCE ON THE EVALUATION OF ONLINE CONSUMER REVIEWS

As a form of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), online consumer reviews have attracted increased attention from marketing researchers and practitioners. Given the importance of consumer online reviews in the tourism and apparel industries, the current study examined how contextual factor (temporal distance of consumption) and personal factor (chronic temporal orientation) moderate the effects of regulatory-focused online reviews on consumers’ attitudinal and behavioral responses. Three web-based experiments were conducted to investigate the conceptual model using athletic shoes (Study1) and hotel (Study 2 and 3). Study 1 showed that participants rated prevention-focused consumer reviews more favorably than promotion-focused consumer reviews when the purchase was temporally proximal. However, their attitudes toward consumer reviews were not significantly different when the purchase was temporally distant. Study 2 found that participants showed more favorable review attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention when they read promotion-focused consumer reviews than prevention-focused consumer review under the temporally distant consumption. However, the differences between two types of reviews were not significant under the temporally consumption. Furthermore, review relevance fully mediated the effects of the interaction on dependent variables. The results of Study 3 indicated that future-oriented consumers showed more favorable review attitude, brand attitude, and a greater purchase intention when they read promotion-focused consumer reviews than when they read prevention-focused consumer reviews. On the other hand, the present-oriented consumers indicated more favorable brand attitude and a greater purchase intention after reading prevention-focused consumer reviews than after reading promotion-focused consumer reviews. Notably, the results of Study 3 demonstrated that regulatory fit fully mediated the interaction effects on dependent variables. This study will make several theoretical contributions to the literature on regulatory focus theory, construal level theory, and regulatory fit theory by providing empirical evidence of theoretical explanations within the context of online consumer reviews. The findings of the current study will also offer new guidelines for marketers in e-tourism and the apparel industry to segment their target audiences and revamp their product review platforms to suit consumer orientation

The importance of customer trust toward ewom on customer behavior: The case of generation y in Indonesia

This study determines the effects of customer trust towards eWOM on customer behavior. This study focuses on Generation Y in Indonesia. The samplesof this study are about 260 respondents who have used eWOM. This study uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to analyze data. The results of this study indicate that trust can mediate the customer experience toward eWOM on customer behavior. The attractiveness of eWOM itself strongly influences customer trust toward eWOM. Other results also show the critical role of customer trust towards eWOM indirectly improving customer behavior

Analysis of Life Context of On-Line Group-Buying Population by Dynamic Decision

While it is difficult to avoid uncertainties when shopping on the Internet, trust can reduce customers’ perceived uncertainties, and enhance their willingness and frequency to buy products and services. The difference in time and space information transparency between customers and on-line sellers, as well as the complex unpredictability of network structure, result in frequent uncertainty for on-line transactions. Therefore, through text mining and integrating the Genetic Algorithm (GA) with the Support Vector Machine (SVM), this project classifies the data of on-line group buying community complaints according to the posts left on Facebook and the three major group-buying websites of Taiwan. The terms are selected based on term frequency, document frequency, uniformity, and conformity, while document classification effectiveness is calculated using precision, recall rate, and F-measure. Community complaints are classified into the uncertain performance indicators that influence on-line group buying for integrated statistics, in order that specific performance indicators of community group-buying websites can be generated. Afterwards, based on the on-line group buying community performance indicator sequence, as integrated according to the dynamic Multicriteria Optimization and Compromise Solution (VIKOR) method and prosperity countermeasure signals, grey correlation sorting is applied to analyze the dynamic performance indicator sequence of different communities, in order to determine the life context of different populations for the reference of on-line group buying providers

Star-Crossed Consumers: The Effects Of Online Rating Scale Length On Product Evaluations

Consumers’ ratings of products are ubiquitous in the online marketplace (e.g., Amazon; Yelp). The rating scales provided by online businesses typically comprise a set of stars that appear in the form of linear scales. Consumers looking to purchase a certain product likely rely on product ratings based on these rating scales. Although past research confirms the intuitive expectation that a higher star rating for a product elicits more favorable responses from consumers, there is a paucity of research related to effects of the properties of the scales themselves on consumers’ psychology. The literature on cognitive processing of information suggests that varying properties of scales might affect people’s processing of them and in turn their perceptions. Both 5-point and 10-point star-based rating scales, i.e., scales with a total of 5 and 10 stars respectively, are common in the online marketplace. Using relevant theories from the cognitive processing literature, this dissertation investigates whether the number of scale points in a rating scale affects consumers’ perceptions of product quality and their purchase intention. The results of three studies show that when a specific rating (e.g., 80%) is presented on a 10-point star-based scale (i.e., 8 out of 10 stars), perceptions of product quality and consumers’ intention to purchase the product are higher compared to when the same rating is presented on a 5-point scale (i.e., 4 out of 5 stars). Implications and limitations of this research are discussed, and directions for further research are provided

Analysis of Life Context of On-Line Group-Buying Population by Dynamic Decision

While it is difficult to avoid uncertainties when shopping on the Internet, trust can reduce customers’ perceived uncertainties, and enhance their willingness and frequency to buy products and services. The difference in time and space information transparency between customers and on-line sellers, as well as the complex unpredictability of network structure, result in frequent uncertainty for on-line transactions. Therefore, through text mining and integrating the Genetic Algorithm (GA) with the Support Vector Machine (SVM), this project classifies the data of on-line group buying community complaints according to the posts left on Facebook and the three major group-buying websites of Taiwan. The terms are selected based on term frequency, document frequency, uniformity, and conformity, while document classification effectiveness is calculated using precision, recall rate, and F-measure. Community complaints are classified into the uncertain performance indicators that influence on-line group buying for integrated statistics, in order that specific performance indicators of community group-buying websites can be generated. Afterwards, based on the on-line group buying community performance indicator sequence, as integrated according to the dynamic Multicriteria Optimization and Compromise Solution (VIKOR) method and prosperity countermeasure signals, grey correlation sorting is applied to analyze the dynamic performance indicator sequence of different communities, in order to determine the life context of different populations for the reference of on-line group buying providers