What makes a hotel review helpful? An information requirement perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the dramatic proliferation of online user-generated content (UGC), research has emerged to gain understanding of what makes a review helpful, and how useful knowledge can be filtered from over-loaded UGC. Hospitality literature has widely examined the characteristics of helpful online reviews for identifying the determinants of helpfulness. In contrast, the influence of embedded opinions in reviews on helpfulness voting has rarely been examined. This study investigated the distribution of 28 identified hotel attributes ranging between helpful and not-helpful categories, in 85,963 hotel reviews. The findings suggest that customer information requirements differ according to hotel class. Some attributes are reported as uniquely helpful for a specific hotel class, such as proximity to a station (3-stars), bed and lobby (4-stars), and experience and drinks (5-stars), whereas other attributes apply to multiple groups, such as walking distance (3–4 stars), English fluency (4–5 stars), and front-desk, street-road, taxi, and value (3–5 stars).