Consistent comments and vivid comments in hotels’ online information adoption: Which matters more?

Abstract

Information adoption is the basis for tourists’ decision making. With the rapid development of tourism e-commerce, online reviews—especially negative ones—have become the main way for tourists to obtain information. Applying attribution theory and a situational experiment, we included online review features and external attribution as antecedents and employed consumer brand relationship characteristics as moderating variables. Our aim is to determine how negative reviews affect hotel consumers’ information adoption behavior. We found that the vividness and consistency of negative online reviews had positive impacts on consumers’ external attribution behavior; external attribution had a positive impact on perceived source credibility and perceived information credibility; source credibility and information credibility had positive impacts on perceived usefulness; perceived usefulness had a positive impact on consumers’ information adoption behavior; and brand trust and brand commitment had no significant moderating effects on the effect of negative online reviews. Using these outcomes, we make suggestions for managers about conducting hotel marketing by means of online reviews.