Abstract
This study analyzes customers’ online social communication to rate lodgings and tourist destinations. A practical methodology is proposed to analyze the online reputation of lodgings as well as the main concepts rated by customers in their online social communication process. To this end, an empirical study was carried out by analyzing the online opinions expressed by customers on the Booking.com tourist lodging website. Based on the information available, three new variables were created and analyzed that represent clearly defined concepts in the minds of consumers. This includes “service quality,” “perceived value,” and “added value.” This study shows that perceived value and service quality are concepts evaluated by customers that are able to differentiate between lodgings in tourist destinations. Therefore, the results show that the online social communication that takes place through this portal has the capacity to guide potential customers by differentiating between the services offered by lodging companies.
Highlights
The critical level of significance, set at 0.05, is only exceeded by the value-added variable (0.312), which, as indicated above, can have positive and negative values and is very subjective because of the effect of price on customers. These results show that online social communication transmitted through the Booking.com website discriminates between destinations on all the variables except one known as the added value, which proves to be an effective process for exchanging information between users
Online social communication is a process through which users share information, opinions, or experiences that, when focused on a particular product, service, image, or company, develop an online reputation (Hernández Estárico et al 2012)
When social communication is carried out through tourist opinion websites such as Booking.com, the results are decisive for creating an adequate and competitive online reputation for tourist accommodations and destinations, which is an aspect that is demonstrated in the study (Wahab et al 2015; Inversini et al 2009; Micera and Crispino 2017)
Summary
The development of digital technology in tourism is influencing the communication and image of tourism companies and destinations (Law et al 2014; Rodríguez-Díaz et al 2015; Kim and Park 2017). Quantitative evaluations of tourist lodgings in relation to the basic concepts of the quality of service, the perceived value, and added value based on the information available on the website of Booking.com and determine whether the social communication process makes it possible to detect significant differences between tourist destinations, which will be analyzed. To achieve these goals, we begin by reviewing the literature concerning an online reputation and the main constructs that are evaluated quantitatively. The study ends with a discussion of the main results obtained as well as the conclusions
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