Examination of Urban Hotels’ Online Review Site Performance with a Comparative Approach based on TripAdvisor and Booking

Abstract

It is an indisputable fact that social media technology has been changing the way of consumers’ information production and knowledge acquisition patterns in terms of their consumptions. One of the most essential components of social media is customer reviews. In tourism field, there are different types of hotel review sites. The purpose of this research is to examine the hotels’ online review performance in the top two review sites (Booking and TripAdvisor) comparatively. The data were collected electronically from the two review sites about 82 hotels located in Ankara and 59 hotels located in Izmir. These total 141 hotels were selected randomly among the ones which are mutually listed in both Booking and TripAdvisor. The findings show that there is a statistically significant difference between TripAdvisor and booking based on the number of hotel reviews and most of the review take place on Booking. Besides, it is revealed that big-scale hotels are better at managing online review sites rather than the small and mid-scale hotels. Another interesting result of this research is that hotel guests dominantly share reviews for showing their satisfaction rather than their dissatisfaction. In accordance with the results obtained from the research, some suggestions are made for researchers and hotel marketers.