Analyzing Hotel Practices Applied to Encourage and Manage Online Guest Reviews

Abstract

As online reviews grow constantly and influence both consumers’ purchase decisions and hospitality companies’ possibilities. It seems important for hotel operators to know how to manage and deal with online guest reviews. However, there is a research gap concerning how to encourage and how to manage online guest reviews in the tourism industry in general and in the hotel industry in particular from hospitality companies’ perspective. Using IPA method, this study investigates the practices used by hotel marketers to encourage and manage online guest reviews through assessing the importance level and usage level of practices, and testing the gap between these two levels. Self-administrated e-mail questionnaire were distributed to the marketing managers at the 5-star hotels in Egypt. The results indicated a statistically significant negative gap between the level of importance managers assigned to each practice and the usage level of that practice for both encouragement and management practices. Overall, the usage level of practices is lower than the importance level. This finding implied that the hotels and managers did not do a good job in matching practices’ importance with practices’ usage. Hence, there are opportunities for changes and improvement in the Egyptian 5-star hotels. This study provide hotels with valuable implications for improving and developing their online marketing strategies and practices.