Effects of official versus online review ratings.

Ghimire, Binam; Shanaev, Savva; Lin, Zhibin

Abstract

The rating systems of tourism and hospitality services are instrumental for both businesses and consumers. Businesses use them to determine their promotion and pricing strategies, while consumers rely on them to make an informed decision. These systems help stakeholders to reduce uncertainties, because of the informational asymmetry between the service providers and the customers. In addition to the official ratings, e.g. AAA Diamond Ratings for hotels (Nalley et al., 2019) and the UK Food Hygiene Ratings for restaurants, today's consumers increasingly use ratings from online customer reviews in websites such as Google Reviews, Yelp and TripAdvisor, while businesses are closely monitoring the changes in the online review ratings (Xu et al., 2020), because a change in the rating could significantly influence their business (Nalley et al., 2019). This study aims to compare the effectiveness of two types of ratings, based on all available restaurants located in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK that had UK Food Hygiene and Google review ratings.

Citation

GHIMIRE, B., SHANAEV, S. and LIN, Z. 2022. Effects of official versus online review ratings. Annals of tourism research [online], 92, article number 103247. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2021.103247

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 12, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jun 3, 2021
• Publication Date: Jan 31, 2022
• Deposit Date: Nov 10, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 10, 2023
• Journal: Annals of tourism research
• Print ISSN: 0160-7383
• Electronic ISSN: 1873-7722
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 92
• Article Number: 103247
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2021.103247
• Keywords: Customer reviews; Online reviews; Official ratings; Quality ratings; Tourism industry
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2078461