Investigating of Online Reviews Usefulness: A Research on Hospitality Industry

Abstract

Emerging internet technologies have radically changed the way of purchasing tourism products and have made online platforms an important position especially for information search processes of the consumers. As a result of the numerous reviews shared daily by users in online environments, it has become difficult to access useful information for the consumers. Review sites start to offer to their users to vote the reviews useful or not to overcome this problem. Reviews that readers find useful, reduce consumers’ information search time and contribute their purchasing decision processes. The contributions of useful reviews have also led researchers to examine what are the features that make a review useful. In this context, the purpose of the study is to determine which features of the review and the reviewer affect the useful vote of review. For this purpose, 8,018 Antalya hotels’ reviews have been downloaded from TripAdvisor. Then, with the logistics regression model, features that contributed to estimating the usefulness of the reviews were identified. Consequently, the review score, the posting date of the review, the sharing of pictures in the review, the total number of useful votes received by the reviewer, the influence of the reviewer and the total number of reviews of the relevant hotel are factors that affect the usefulness of the review.