Author: Liu, S., Wang, N., Baojun Gao, & Gallivan, M.

Abstract:Hotel managers increasingly compose rote responses (eg, similar responses repeated from prior responses) to reviews when dealing with customers' opinions while improving efficiency and saving cost. However, such responses may be ineffective because they are unspecific and add little information to reviewers ' comments. To address this dilemma, we examine the degree of managers' rote responses to identify the similarity of managers' response texts. Basing on panel data of 334,671 reviews and 169,794 manager responses from 868 hotels in TripAdvisor, we find that customers leave fewer reviews and lower review valence during the subsequent month, when the level of roteness of managers' responses is higher. However, rote responses only decrease the volume of subsequent positive reviews but have no influence on the volume of negative reviews. Moreover, such effects are weaker for chain hotels than for independent ones. Therefore, managers should differentiate their responses to onl ine reviews, particularly for independent hotels.

Keywords:Hotel management; Rote response; Information quality; Levenshtein distance; Online review; Response customization

This article will be officially published in Tourism Management in October 2021, which is an English B+ award journal of the college, and Gao Baojun is the corresponding author of this article.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2021.104346