The proliferation of content generated by tourists, in parallel with the exponential growth of social media is causing a paradigm shift in research. Traditional surveys cannot be necessary to obtain users' opinions when scholars can access this valuable information freely through social media. In the domain of tourism, online tourists' reviews (OTRs) shared on online travel communities stand out. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of OTRs in analysing the image of a green hotel. The authors also examine the possible differences in the content of green hotel online reviews across Anglos and European tourists. The data source are 28,189 reviews by tourists shared on TripAdvisor regarding the 82 green hotels of the city of Amsterdam. The findings showed that tourist's culture significantly determine the content of the OTRs. The results show preferences and opinions from the tourist's perspective, which can be useful for hotel managers to promoting sustainability practices.
TopIntroduction
The proliferation of online travel communities where consumers can connect with one another effectively, has enabled everyone nowadays to share their tourists’ experiences, providing what is commonly known as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) (Oliveira and Casais, 2019). One of the most widely available types of eWOM is online tourist reviews (OTRs). In OTRs, tourists freely share their consumption experiences (D’Acunto et al., 2020), and find information about destinations (Marine-Roig, 2019), destination attractions (Filieri et al., 2021), accommodation (Kumari and Sangeeetha, 2022) or restaurants (Kim and Hwang, 2022). OTRs, as a post-consumption response, have revolutionized travellers purchasing decisions in the last decade (Kumari and Sangeetha, 2022). One of the most a well-known and popular review platforms is TripAdvisor, which hosted more than 73 millons reviews and opinions were submitted to the platform by 23 milions members from different countries. This includes 30.2 millions reviews and 31.6 million photos and videos shared by TripAdvisor community. Furthermore, 40,30% of the reviews have been posted about accommodations business (TripAdvisor, 2023). In addition, TripAdvisor is a trustworthy source of user content. Tripadvisor has a three-part system for reviewing reviews to ensure their accuracy. Once reviewed, the vast majority of review submissions are approved for posting, but some are immediately rejected, while others are flagged for further assessment by Tripadvisor's content moderation team. Past research has shown that many consumers read the online reviews of other tourists and consider them when purchasing services (Lin et al., 2021). In short, these sites have become the most useful online information sources for consumers worldwide. Consequently, online reviews have attracted more attention from marketing and tourism scholars.
Online reviews have several functions, first describe real experience that offers great opportunities to zoom in the multi-faceted dimensionality of image perceived and transmitted by tourists; second, reports the sentiment of tourist by its textual content (Taecharungroj and Mathayomchan, 2019). Prior literature in hospitality field has analyzed OTRs as a key tool for customer-customer or customer-company interaction; however only a few studies have considered these user content generated as data that provides deeper understanding of overall brand image of tourism companies (e.g., Wang et al., 2019; Lin et al., 2022). Prior literature has explored OTRs in various tourism contexts such as accommodation (Kim and Kim, 2022), restaurants (Lin et al., 2022), attractions (Bigné et al., 2023 and destinations (Marine-Roig et al., 2019). However, few studies have resorted to online reviews for research purposes in the domain of green hotels (e.g., Arici et al., 2023), which is one of the fastest growing hotels segments nowadays (Yang et al., 2022) due to the growth of environmental consciousness among consumers (Galati et al., 2021).
Hence, a relevant research question is the following:
Additionally, understanding customers’ feelings embedded in the comments of online reviews is crucial. In terms of sentiments of online reviews most of the previous studies have used ratings as indicators of reviews’ polarity (i.e., Dhar and Bose 2022) however, a recent study by Bigné et al. (2023) reports that the star rating of an online review maybe misaligned with the sentiment of its textual content.