The role of "online user generated hotel reviews" in accommodation purchase behaviour of Kuala Lumpur international free independent travellers

Abstract

Since the advent of web 2.0 technology, an increasing number of travellers use Internet for travel planning, booking their hotels and finding information about their travel destinations. Prior studies revealed that online user-generated reviews have a significant influence on the sales of experience products. In this research, in order to analyse the influence of online user generated hotel reviews on the accommodation purchase behaviour of Kuala Lumpur international free independent tourists, their behaviour towards online user generated reviews and the role of these reviews in their accommodation purchase behaviour were studied through empirical research. The tourists’ behaviour towards online user generated reviews was defined through five elements, namely use and trustworthiness of online user generated reviews as a source of information for hotel selection, travellers’ reference to online reviews before selecting a hotel, the position of online reviews amongst the other important hotel selection factors and the travellers’ willingness to write an online review about their recent hotel. The data derived from the individual interviews was analysed through standard statistical methods including Pearson correlation for finding significant correlations amongst ordinal variables and Kruskal-Wallis H test to find significant differences in the behaviour of travellers from different nominal variable groups. The results of data analysis show that, online reviews were used by more than 91% of the respondents of this research and ranks number one amongst the other sources of information. In terms of trustworthiness, online reviews were rated “trustworthy” by more than 83% of the respondents. Lastly, while a significant majority of respondents find online reviews a more important hotel selection factor than “number of stars” and “brand”, most of the respondents reported that “location” and “facilities” of a hotel, is a more important factor for them for selecting a hotel.