Word of Mouth, the Importance of Reviews and Ratings in Tourism Marketing

The Internet and social media have given place to what is commonly known as the democratization of content and this phenomenon is changing the way that consumers and companies interact. Business strategies are shifting from influencing consumers directly and induce sales to mediating the influence that Internet users have on each other. A consumer review is “a mixture of fact and opinion, impression and sentiment, found and unfound tidbits, experiences, and even rumor” (Blackshaw & Nazarro, 2006). Consumers' comments are seen as honest and transparent, but it is their subjective perception what shapes the behavior of other potential consumers. With the emergence of the Internet, tourists search for information and reviews of destinations, hotels or services. Several studies have highlighted the great influence of online reputation through reviews and ratings and how it affects purchasing decisions by others (Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2015). These reviews are seen as unbiased and trustworthy, and considered to reduce uncertainty and perceived risks (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Park & Nicolau, 2015). Before choosing a destination, tourists are likely to spend a significant amount of time searching for information including reviews of other tourists posted on the Internet. The average traveler browses 38 websites prior to purchasing vacation packages (Schaal, 2013), which may include tourism forums, online reviews in booking sites and other generic social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Extending the reach: Exploring what it means to be a parent of a hostel adolescent assisting with their child\u27s career development : a case study

Research indicates that parents are an important influence on the career development of their children, but, that they have often been considered as an untapped resource. Rural high school aged students, who reside in metropolitan hostels, often live with their parents for less than 15 weeks per year. How do their parents contribute to their career development? This one year research explored the involvement of parents of hostel children, in the career development process of their youth. Through a case study, an analysis described what it means to be a parent of a hostel adolescent with respects to how they help their youth make career decisions. Based within an ecological framework, parents of hostel adolescents completed a questionnaire. Subsets of this group participated in interviews that focused on narratives and a modification of the critical incident technique as used by Young et al. (1992, 1998), and/or group interviews incorporating a ‘direct to print’ methodology as used by Jeffery et al. (1992).This study supported early findings recognising the important parental role in the career development of todays youth by exploring five areas. The cultural capital of parents of hostel adolescents indicates that they have a real sense of pride in their rural status, actively choosing to live in rural centres. They value honesty and respect, enjoying the freedom ‘country’ life affords them. There are general concerns of safety when their children are living in urban centres and at times an acute awareness of costs. Specific concerns for career development focus on parents perceiving they have a lack of knowledge, skills and expertise essential to adequately assist their childs career development. This situation appears to be compounded by a lack of awareness of resources and/or a reluctance to access them. Parent intentions are to instill in their children independence, responsibility, initiative, perseverance and respect. The most common focal point for career development is the selection of subjects for studies and/or courses to complete. Parents of hostel adolescents favour delivery activities that involve them advising their children and requesting and giving information. They encourage and support their children, showing interest and communicating values. They also see the need to set expectations and limits. This research illustrates that parents of hostel adolescents, although not necessarily attempting to influence particular occupational choice are active agents in influencing their children in a broad range of areas in career development

Research Proposal for Analyzing Users of Consumer Generated Media Based on Age

Consumer Generated Media (CGM), a form of internet service in which customers provide feedback on the goods and services they have utilized, is the fastest growing sector on the internet. In fact, in 2005, more than 1.4 billion “consumer comments” were created for CGM. For the travel and hospitality industry, Tripadvisor™ is the largest source of information and data. It receives 47 million visits monthly. Although CGM is increasingly relied upon by consumers, limited research has been conducted to demonstrate its value for businesses. Beyond an analysis regarding differences in CGM adoption on a country by country basis, there is a gap in demographic data. This proposal develops a method for determining the ages of CGM users. This research is proposed considering the negative relationship between age and general internet usage. To determine the age breakdown of Tripadvisor users, questionnaires will be conducted at the ten most-visited cities in the United States. In each city, three hotels will be chosen at random where respondents will be asked to provide their age, and answer on a one-to-five scale, the level of reliance that they placed in TripAdvisor before reserving their respective hotel. After processing the raw data, the analysis of Tripadvisor users is intended to provide tourism and hospitality business with a greater insight into information sharing. With an understanding of the user-age-breakdown from Tripadvisor, companies can juxtapose their consumer base and better utilize their marketing and advertising budgets

FAKE REVIEWS AND MANIPULATION: DO CUSTOMER REVIEWS MATTER?

With the prevalence of fake reviews across web and e-commerce platforms it has become difficult for the customers to make an informed purchase decision. Considering this we examine the influence of review manipulation on customer’s purchase decision. A qualitative approach employing interviews with frequent online shoppers was employed to explore the phenomenon. The results of the study suggest that customers accord recommendations from their social network more weightage than the reviews available on an e-commerce platform. Further, we found that customers apply either or both interactive and extractive strategies to deal with review manipulation. Keywords: information processing, review manipulation, fake reviews, grounded theory

Hidden Cost in the Global Economy: Human Trafficking of Philippine Males in Maritime, Construction and Agriculture

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.Verit%C3%A9_TIP_Report_Male_Trafficking.pdf: 1162 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Malaysian learners’ argumentative writing in English: A contrastive, corpus-driven study

Research on learner English is by now an established sub-discipline in corpus linguistics, yet few studies exist on Malaysian learners. This thesis explores the difficulties that Malaysian learners of English face when producing argumentative essays, focussing on their overuse of particular linguistic features. WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012) is used to analyse and compare two corpora: The Malaysian Corpus of Students’ Argumentative Writing (MCSAW): Version 2, consisting of 1,460 Malaysian students’ argumentative essays; and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), which is a corpus of native English essays written by British and American students and is used as a reference language variety here. The software enables analysis of keywords (words that are over-used in MCSCAW), collocates or surrounding words of the keywords, and concordances, which are used to examine the keywords in context. Crucially, it also allows examination of the ‘range’ of linguistic features (i.e. by how many students a feature is employed) – an under-used but crucial affordance of this software programme that is exploited in this thesis for down-sampling purposes. The thesis combines quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic techniques, with keywords providing the starting point for in-depth qualitative analysis using concordancing. This corpus-driven analysis of MCSAW identifies typical features of the writing style of Malaysian learners’ writing of English, particularly the overuse of can and we (including the highly frequent bundle we can), and the lack of discourse-organising markers. Analysis of key words and key bundles is complemented with collocation analysis and concordancing of the highly frequent modal verb can as well as the highly frequent first person plural pronoun we, which both have a high range across the corpus. The concordances are carefully and systematically examined to explore the ways in which these over-used linguistic items are actually employed in their co-text by the Malaysian writers. While results show some similarities in both learner corpus and reference language variety, Malaysian learners tend to demonstrate higher writer visibility overall. One possible explanation lies in the influence of the national language (Malay). The thesis also identifies repeated sentences that occur in more than one essay, which implies either plagiarism on the learners’ part or a particular teaching strategy (templates or phrases that are provided to students). This finding has significant implications for corpus design (in terms of the need for more topic variation) as well as methodological significance (in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of using the ‘range’ feature for down-sampling), which are also discussed in this thesis. In sum, this thesis makes a new contribution to corpus linguistic research on learner English and will have implications for the development of teaching practices for Malaysian learners of English

The becoming of social media: the role of rating, ranking and performativity in organizational reputation-making

This thesis explores the concept of reputation-making with the aim of explaining how the rise of user-generated content websites has influenced organizational reputationmaking practices in the travel sector. The findings are based upon a corpus of data including: a field study at the offices of the largest travel user-generated website operator, TripAdvisor and an adaptation of virtual ethnography called “netnography”. Rating and ranking of hotels on social media websites has not only disturbed the established reputation-making practices of professionals in the travel sector and contributed to a significant redirection of reservation revenue but has performative consequences for tourist encounters. In other words, it is argued that if key assumptions underpinning the rating and ranking of travel change, the enactment of travel itself is reconfiguring and this has important implications for how reputationmaking occurs. The reconfigurations documented in the study are theorized using the lens of Process Theory. Originally inspired by philosophers such as Bergson and Whitehead and adopted in the work of organizational theorists such as Tsoukas, Chia, Langley, and Nayak, the choice of Process Theory to inform the conduct of this study resonates with key streams of existing reputation research that view it as a dynamic phenomenon. Core concepts within Process Theory, such as “becoming” enable further investigation into the precise nature of this dynamism by focusing on relations as always fluid and on the move. The challenge, even for literature that acknowledges phenomena as dynamic, is how to temporarily pause the flow for the purpose of analysis and thereby approach becoming without disturbing its inherent nature. This is taken up in the first analysis chapter which uses the notion of place to illustrate and analyze reputation-making using the process of becoming. The chapter argues the importance of recognizing the temporary pauses produced by rating and ranking mechanisms as generative rather than merely reductive algorithmically produced representations. In this way, we get closer to understanding the performativity of phenomena such as TripAdvisor and produce fundamental insights informing organizational reputation-making. It is argued that the organizational devices through which travellers’ engage with the places they visit are not only “making” reputations but are also making formative differences to the practice of travelling. In the second analysis chapter, a key issue associated with these changes - the intensification in focus on service – is explored further and in-depth examination of the field data is used to highlight ways in which TripAdvisor amplifies attention given to the specific characteristics of practices when they are performed. This provides evidence to ground Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002) proposal that organizational change is achieved through ‘microscopic changes’ thus reinforcing the processual nature of change. In so doing, key insights are generated to inform organizational reputation-making. Returning to the tenet of becoming in the third analysis chapter, the “circle of (il)legitimacy” embraces processual principles - for the nature of the circle is to have no beginning or end – but acknowledges the cumulative outcome of configuring practices for hoteliers through a discussion of key issues emerging in the travel sector. The relationship between reputation-making and legitimation is highlighted with examples of the additional processes through which reputation can now be made vulnerable within multiple jurisdictional contexts. The thesis concludes with the assertion that if we aim to understand the phenomenon of reputation-making, we have to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated way to conceptualize its formativeness. It is suggested that this extends beyond snap shot assessments or post-hoc crisis management to on-going maintenance of its emergence and development as well as processual changes across time and space

A Design Concept for a Tourism Recommender System for Regional Development

Despite of tourism infrastructure and software, the development of tourism is hampered due to the lack of information support, which encapsulates various aspects of travel implementation. This paper highlights a demand for integrating various approaches and methods to develop a universal tourism information recommender system when building individual tourist routes. The study objective is proposing a concept of a universal information recommender system for building a personalized tourist route. The developed design concept for such a system involves a procedure for data collection and preparation for tourism product synthesis; a methodology for tourism product formation according to user preferences; the main stages of this methodology implementation. To collect and store information from real travelers, this paper proposes to use elements of blockchain technology in order to ensure information security. A model that specifies the key elements of a tourist route planning process is presented. This article can serve as a reference and knowledge base for digital business system analysts, system designers, and digital tourism business implementers for better digital business system design and implementation in the tourism sector