Abstract
In the current era of digitalization, most hotels are present on the Internet and most booking decisions are made online. Several online public review platforms exist, and it is crucial to know how their specific affordances influence the formulation of online negative reviews, as differences in the make-up of online reviews are likely to affect hotel managers' responses to these reviews and other customers' decisions. This research explores the impact of TripAdvisor's and Booking.com's affordances on the content of hotel reviews. Using a multilingual corpus, we selected 100 negative reviews written in French on each of these two platforms and compared them in terms of review length, the number of constitutive negative review components, how a particular component is realized, and the use of upgraders and downgraders. We predicted reviews to be more explicitly negative on TripAdvisor than on Booking.com because Booking.com's affordances elicit both positive and negative comments, as the platform provides a blank text template for positive comments and one for negative comments, and because it invites feedback in the form of lists instead of narratives, thus decreasing the likelihood of dissatisfaction narratives to unfold. Our results confirm these predictions: TripAdvisor reviews are longer than Booking.com reviews; the former are also more explicit, and include a larger variety of negative evaluations.
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