Modeling Consumer Distrust Of Online Hotel Reviews

Online hotel reviews have become one of most important sources of information in travel decision making.The online reviews literature has tended to focus on exploring perspectives such as the recipient's attitude,reviews' message-based factors,reviews' trustworthiness,and hotel sales.But research fails to address the underlying processes of consumer distrust of online hotel reviews.Based on a rich stream of literature,this study offers a hierarchicalinfluence model of consumer distrust of online hotel reviews following a hotel service failure.The research model considers how consumers are influenced by two particular attributes of reviewers,how they make attributions following a service failure,and the relational outcomes of distrust in the form of low repeat purchase intention and engagement to negative word of mouth.Data were collected from 417 hospitality consumers in the fastest growing hotel industry market(i.e.China).Statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS Statistics version 18.0 and SPSS Amos version 18.0.We used SPSS software for descriptive data analysis,moderation analysis,common method variance estimations and Cronbach's alpha tests.Tests for confirmatory factor analysis(CFA),and structural equation modeling(SEM)were performed using Amos.The structural equation modeling was employed to check structural relationships and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to establish factorial structure.For moderation hypotheses,we checked for simple main effects and moderation effects.After applying the model to hospitality consumers in China,we find that the reviewer attributes of fake identity and ulterior motivation directly influence distrust,which further leads to consumers' psychological discomfort and engagement in negative electronic wordof-mouth.Surprisingly,psychological discomfort positively affects repeat purchase intentions.Service failure attribution positively moderates the relationship between reviewer attributes and distrust.Theoretical contributions and suggestions to hotel firms and online travel websites are offered.We close by acknowledging the study's limitations and suggesting directions for future related research.