A comparative analysis of major online review platforms: Implications for social media analytics in hospitality and tourism

Highlights

• We applied text analytics to compare three major online review platforms, namely, TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Yelp.

• Findings show discrepancies in the representation of hotel product on these platforms.

• Information quality, measured by linguistic and semantic features, sentiment, rating, and usefulness, varies considerably.

• This study is the first to comparatively explore data quality in social media studies in hospitality and tourism.

• This study highlights methodological challenges and contributes to the theoretical development of social media analytics.

Abstract

Online consumer reviews have been studied for various research problems in hospitality and tourism. However, existing studies using review data tend to rely on a single data source and data quality is largely anecdotal. This greatly limits the generalizability and contribution of social media analytics research. Through text analytics this study comparatively examines three major online review platforms, namely TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Yelp, in terms of information quality related to online reviews about the entire hotel population in Manhattan, New York City. The findings show that there are huge discrepancies in the representation of the hotel industry on these platforms. Particularly, online reviews vary considerably in terms of their linguistic characteristics, semantic features, sentiment, rating, usefulness as well as the relationships between these features. This study offers a basis for understanding the methodological challenges and identifies several research directions for social media analytics in hospitality and tourism.

Introduction

There is a growing literature on social media analytics that combines Web crawling, computational linguistics, machine learning and statistical techniques to collect, analyze, and interpret the so-called big data for business purposes such as tracking trending topics and popular sentiments as well as identifying opinions and beliefs about products (Fan and Gordon, 2014, Lazer et al., 2009). Particularly, online consumer reviews, widely considered a rich data source that reflects consumer experiences and evaluation of products, have been studied to understand a range of research problems in hospitality and tourism (Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2015b). Studies using online reviews usually employ a sample of review (and related) data, large or small, to extract features or measures that allow the researcher to detect, describe or predict patterns that are meaningful from theoretical or practical perspectives. This literature complements conventional approaches that primarily rely on surveys, personal interviews and other communication-based methods and represents a promising research direction by taking advantage of the abundant, readily available data resources (Xiang, Schwartz, Gerdes, & Uysal, 2015). While this line of research has generated novel insights into hospitality and tourism management, existing studies are limited in that 1) they tend to use a single data source for online reviews and 2) the quality of data is largely anecdotal and often based upon the popularity of the websites from which the data were collected, which substantially limits their generalizability and contribution to knowledge.

With this in mind, this study comparatively examines three major online review platforms, namely TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Yelp, in terms of information quality related to online reviews in these websites with the goal to provide a basis for understanding the methodological challenges and for identifying opportunities for the development of social media analytics in hospitality and tourism. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the next section, Research Background, reviews related literature to provide the motivations for the present study. In Research Design and Analytical Framework, we outline our methodological approaches and describe key measures and methods used to assess the three platforms with specific research questions. In Data Collection and Analysis, we describe the data collection process and explain, in details, the text analytics procedures to develop key metrics to describe review characteristics as well as statistical analyses conducted to compare and contrast the three platforms. Then, research findings are presented followed by a discussion on implications for both research and practice. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and limitations and directions for future research are discussed.