Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate if there is a trend in online consumers’ environmental discourse, and whether online consumers’ environmental discourse differs across different types of online review platforms, i.e., transaction-based vs. community-based platforms. To achieve this purpose, first we define the concept of online consumers’ environmental discourse and operationalize the measures of online consumers’ environmental discourse presence and depth. Second, we retrieve more than 5.5 million online reviews related to hotels located in leading tourism destinations in the Americas and Europe, over the period 2003–2018. The online reviews, collected and analyzed using big data analytical techniques, are sourced from two different types of platforms: Booking.com and Tripadvisor. We find that while environmental awareness (i.e., the presence of online environmental discourse) is relatively high but declining over time, the depth of the environmental discourse is rather marginal but increasing over time. We also observe that both the presence and depth of environmental discourse, as well as other text analytics (subjectivity, diversity, length, sentiment, readability), related to the environmental discourse differ across platforms. The relevant theoretical contributions and managerial implications for tourism and hospitality research are also discussed.
Highlights
Environmental sustainability and sustainable development have become increasingly relevant topics in the agenda of tourism policy makers, destination managers and tourism researchers alike (Hall, 2019)
These figures suggest that the presence of environmentalrelated electronic word-ofmouth (eWOM) is relevant in both platforms, representing one fourth of Booking.com ORs and one half of Tripadvisor ORs
The inter-platform comparison over the timespan 2017–2018 suggests that the presence of environmental-related eWOM is higher for communitybased OR platforms such as Tripadvisor, than it is for transaction-based platforms such as Booking.com
Summary
Environmental sustainability and sustainable development have become increasingly relevant topics in the agenda of tourism policy makers, destination managers and tourism researchers alike (Hall, 2019). The importance of these topics is witnessed by the presence of a growing body of research that has been published by an academic journal entirely dedicated to sustainable tourism and a number of other academic outlets. Despite the (rhetorical) emphasis on environmental sustainability that the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has developed in its official documents, a number of scholars have underlined that, at the global scale, tourism is less sustainable than ever (e.g., Oklevik et al, 2019; Rutty et al, 2015; Scott et al, 2016).
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