High-End Hotels Manipulate Reviews when Competing with Airbnb
hubie writes:
High-end hotels manipulate reviews when competing with Airbnb:
You may want to take online reviews with a grain of salt the next time you plan a vacation. Researchers found high-end hotels often inflate their ratings when they face greater competition from Airbnb.
[...] "We know hotels adapted to the competition with Airbnb by lowering prices, but we wanted to know if there was something else hotels were doing," said Nie.
Before Airbnb emerged as a global player in the hospitality industry, several studies found between 15% and 30% of online reviews for hotels were made up. Hotel managers created fake customer reviews to boost their ratings and drag down their competitors. This "review manipulation" was highest among independent hotels in competitive markets.
[...] They found pressure from Airbnb listings led high-end hotels to increase their fake, positive reviews. But badmouthing other hotels with similar price points dropped off. Without the fake, negative reviews from their competing hotels, their overall ratings skewed higher.
The authors described this shift among hotels as "co-opetition instead of tit-for-tat."
As for low-end hotels, the researchers found Airbnb did not have an effect. The tendency to post fake reviews, whether positive or negative, stayed the same. To help explain this, Nie shared that low-end hotels generally have a smaller volume of customer reviews and rely on them less to fill rooms compared to high-end hotels.
[...] Customer reviews increasingly influence people's purchasing decisions online. Along with helping people narrow their options, previous research has shown reviews are considered more credible than promotional campaigns. But as Nie and his colleagues show, they need to be viewed with some skepticism.
Journal Reference:
Cheng Nie, Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng, and Sumit Sarkar. Competing with the Sharing Economy: Incumbents' Reaction on Review Manipulation, [open] MISQ, 2022. (DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2022/15666)
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