Respond More to Good Targets: An Empirical Study of Managerial Response Strategy in Online Travel Websites

Abstract

This paper focuses on the managerial response system which is prevalent in online travel websites like TripAdvisor and Booking.com. Hotel managers face a trade-off between the consumers' growing demands for high-quality response contents and the rising costs of review management. One aspect which has attracted little academic attention is how hotel managers reduce costs by targeting a small consumer group. The purpose of this study is to identify the consequences of responding to different consumer groups. Through constructing a panel regression model with hotel fixed effect, the authors find that responding more to consumers who have ever posted more lower ratings can boost the hotels' subsequent review volume and ratings. However, consumers' review posting experience and reputation in the community are not good criteria for hotel managers to select targets to give responses. The study provides implications for tourism literature and managerial insights for the hotels in the travel websites.