The Influential Factors Of Credibility Of Hotel Online Reviews

The hotel industry developing rapidly in China in recent years. But with the rapid growth of hotel brands and numbers,it will make customers in a hard situation when they are choosing a hotel.With the development of e-commerce, more and more people would like to book hotel online, and will search online reviews before shopping online. The invisibility of hotel products, also make the customers even more dependent on online reviews of auxiliary decision-making role. However, because of the network anonymity, customers are hard to discern the publisher was a real consumer, and also difficult to discern online reviews were true and reliable. In addition, both at home and abroad many news pointed out that online reviews of some goods were fake counterfeit. It can increase the risk of the customer’s perception, which will reduce the customer’s trust of online reviews, weakened the effect of supporting decision-making on customer of online reviews. By research the credibility of hotel online reviews, it can enrich the current studies of online reviews interms of theroy, it can also help booking hotel website to manage online reviews better.In order to research the factors of credibility of hotel online reviews, this dissertation has found that factors can be mainly classified into three aspects: comment sources, comment receivers, comment features after literature review. This dissertation from mass communication’s angle, and based on the process of communication Theory, and combined with the real situation of hotel online reviews in our country, proposed eight factors to verify from the four elements in the process of the propagation. In addition, this dissertation also analysed the hotel price’s moderating effect. This dissertation verified all proposed assumptions through the regression analysis with the data from questionnaires. The primary results achieved in this dissertation:the factors of credibility of online reviews of different commodities are different; the majority of customers trust hotel online reviews; customers more trust neutral comment; all of eight factors have significantly positive effects on customer trust online reviews; website reputation’s influence degree is the largest one; the timeliness online review has the strongest influence in message elements; the publisher similarity has the strongest influence in source elements; trust tendency’s influence degree is the minimum one; the hotel price’s moderating effect is not significant.