Monitoring hotel response management: a multidimensional approach

Abstract

How companies respond to their customers’ reviews is a key issue. These responses can affect the perceptions that current and potential customers have about a company. This is particularly true for tourism services. This paper proposes a model to monitor hotels’ response strategy to online reviews and to evaluate the effectiveness of their communication through its impact on customer satisfaction and promotional behaviour, specifically in terms of customers’ revisiting and recommendation intentions. The proposed model evaluates customers’ perceptions about the response they receive by splitting hotels’ response management (HRM) into two dimensions (communication quality and response policy) to evaluate the response strategy more precisely. Moreover, the effectiveness of HRM is moderated by a set of variables that can provide relevant additional information to managers. Results confirm a positive influence of two dimensions of HRM on satisfaction and promotional behaviour and the moderating effect of comment relevance, rating, polarity and reviewer’s experience.