Predicting Conversion Rates in Online Hotel Bookings with Customer Reviews

E-commerce in the hospitality and tourism field has already ranked No. 2 among all online shopping categories worldwide. However, customers’ visits to a hotel booking website cannot guarantee the generation of sales, while the conversion rate is regarded as the indicator that effectively assesses th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of theoretical and applied electronic commerce research Vol. 17; no. 4; pp. 1264 - 1278
Main Authors Tang, Liang, Wang, Xi, Kim, Eojina
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Curicó MDPI AG 01.09.2022
Subjects
Behavior
Conversion
conversion rate
Customers
e-commerce in hospitality
Electronic commerce
Emotions
hotel booking
Hotels
Hotels & motels
Influence
Information processing
linguistic style matching
Linguistics
Patronage
Plutchik’s emotion wheel
Recommender systems
Semantics
Tourism
Websites
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Summary:E-commerce in the hospitality and tourism field has already ranked No. 2 among all online shopping categories worldwide. However, customers’ visits to a hotel booking website cannot guarantee the generation of sales, while the conversion rate is regarded as the indicator that effectively assesses the e-commerce website performance. This study aimed to investigate the influential factors of conversion rates from both affective content and the communication style of customer’s online reviews. The affective content was evaluated with eight emotional dimensions (i.e., joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, anticipation, and surprise) in Plutchik’s emotion wheel, and the communication style perspective was assessed with linguistic style matching (LSM). In total, 111,926 customer reviews from 641 hotels in five cities in the U.S. were collected for the analysis. Results indicated that LSM and four emotions have significant impacts on hotel conversion rates. This research contributes to the knowledge body of customers’ conversion behaviors on hotel booking websites and offers pertinent practical implications.
ISSN:0718-1876
0718-1876
DOI:10.3390/jtaer17040064