Brand, Identity and Reputation: Exploring, Creating New Realities ...

―There was a Cockroach in my Room‖ – an Analysis of Customer Feedback on Hotel Booking Websites as an
Example of Co-creation of Meaning
Petra Bouvain, University of Canberra, Australia
Matthias Muskat, University of Canberra, Australia
Brigit Muskat, University of Canberra, Australia
Introduction
The tourism industry has undergone fundamental changes in the way that customers obtain information and the way that
they book their holidays. Providing information about destinations, flights and hotels via the Internet is now considered
standard practice. Most hotels have a website that promotes their property and provides information about the
amenities that are offered, in most cases augmented by the display of photos, downloadable brochures and videos. The
accommodation providers range from multinationals to SMEs and micro businesses. Branding and reputation can be
considered a key resource for SMEs (Abimbola & Kocak, 2007). Most hotel sites offer customers also the possibility to
book online and to communicate via email. Customers have relied in their decision making on the reputation of the
hotel brand, on the information that hotels provide and some reviews that may have been undertaken by third parties
such as travel guidebooks like the Michelin guide books or Lonely Planet.
Purpose of the Paper
The paper shows how the emergence of Web2.0 has changed the nature of the interaction between hotels and consumers
and explores how word of mouth is amplified via new intermediaries. Consumers are now able to not only communicate
via email with tourism providers but are able to share views and experiences with other consumers via Twitter and
Facebook. Consumers now trust their peers more than they do trust the information provided by corporations. The
increasing amount of user-generated content in marketing websites changes the way that decisions are made and in this
context the impact of trust buyer-seller relationship has been discussed in marketing as well as in organisational studies
(Chang & Chen, 2008; Ganesan & Hess, 1997; Kim, Chung, & Lee, 2010; Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Zhu & Zhang, 2010).
The expectation of customers is that information provided by peers is more trustworthy. A study by Forrester Research
showed that reviews/ratings are considered to have the highest share of influence (32%) followed by discussion forums
(29%), blog comments (24%) and blog posts (16%). Facebook is considered to have the highest share of influence
(62%) of all social networking sites (Forrester Research, 2010).
Word of mouth has long been considered one of the most trusted sources of information and marketers in the hospitality
and tourism management sector are looking at strategies to manage and influence user-generated content social media
as part of integrated marketing communication strategies (Litvin, Goldsmith, & Pan, 2008; McConnell & Huba, 2007;
Xiang & Gretzel, 2010).
Consumers are increasingly looking for information to aid decision making from their peers and no longer rely on
promotional material provided by the company. This changing behaviour is having an impact of how customers are
targeted depending on their engagement within social networks (Nielsen, 2009). Shao (2009) examines the appeal of
user generated media and concludes that consumers perceive as one of the core benefits the obtaining of information,
but also points out that there is an element of entertainment included in the experience while consumers engage in
blogging, twitting, document sharing and posting of information. All these Internet activities enable consumers to
obtain a collective intelligence (Litvin et al., 2008). While individual comments may be somewhat helpful the sum of
the comments provides a broad spectrum of opinions, aided by information about the provider of the feedback.
Different sites provide varying background information on the contributors, categorised as business traveller, couples,
families with children and country of origin of the traveller. The rapid growth of hotel feedback sites is increasingly
important in international hotel marketing, as potential visitors are more and more using these web-sites as their main
source of information (Buhalis, 2003).
Positive comments tend to be viewed by customers as more helpful when compared to negative comments when
deciding to book accommodation (Black & Kelley, 2009). The expertise of the reviewer, familiarity with the hotel
brand and the sentiment of the review (positive or negative in nature) referred to by Vermeulen and Seegers (2009) as
review valence have been shown in an experimental study to have an influence on consumer choices, which is not
surprising, but the interesting fact was that both positive and negative reviews had an influence on consumers
considering a particular hotel (Vermeulen & Seegers, 2009). There is some evidence that shows the impact of customer
feedback on room occupancy rates which has been explored in a regression model of a Chinese travel site by Ye, Law
and Gu (2009). The study showed that positive feedback had a positive impact on room sales, which again could be
expected. However the study did not have access to actual room sales data, but provides, by using proxies, some
interesting insights into the effects of online feedback on hotel bookings.
A number of studies (Bonn, Furr, & Susskind, 1998; Weber & Roehl, 1999) examined the demographic characteristics
of online booking customers and they found that online customers have higher education levels and are between 25 and
55 years of age. This finding has been supported by data obtained from Alexa.com in 2010. Murphy et al. have been
one of the early researchers that examined the factors that were more likely to lead to bookings on online hotel booking
sites (Murphy, Forrest, Wotring, & Byrmer, 1996). Kim and Kim (2004) investigated the factors that make online
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