Research on the Influences of Textual and Pictorial Reviews on Customer Ratings in Five-star Hotels of Beijing

Kaung-Hwa Chen；Ying Ye

online review ； pictorial review ； textual review ； customer rating ； hospitality

島嶼觀光研究

14卷3期（2023 / 06 / 01）

47 - 69

英文

Reviews and customer ratings are main sources of information used as a reference by potential customers to evaluate hotels, however, the relationship between reviews and customer ratings is still to be verified, especially the pictorial reviews and customer ratings. This study adopts content analysis with manual coding and quantitative analysis to verify the relationship between pictorial and textual reviews and customer ratings on the basis of a sample of 4,156 reviews with photos and text for 160 five-star hotels in Beijing. Findings show that textual and pictorial reviews complement each other to predict customer ratings. In textual reviews, positive sentiment has a greater effect on customer ratings than negative sentiment and neutral sentiment, and word length has a significantly negative influence on customer ratings only in short length (range is 2 to 142). Pictorial reviews of depicting public facilities, in-room facilities, catering, view have significantly positive influence on customer ratings. Implications for academic research and management practices and future research directions are discussed.

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