Categorizing peer-to-peer review site features and examining their impacts on room sales [Summary]

This study examines the impacts of online review features on hotel Online Room Sales for various types of hotel segments utilizing a dataset that includes 227,378 post-purchase customer review comments for 1,092 hotels. Findings suggest that overall recommendation scores and hotel attribute information are the two most critical features of online reviews used by consumers in their decision-making process to make their hotel booking decisions. Thus, changes in customer rating scores result in a profound impact on room sales. However, the impact sizes of these review features are not significantly different among different hotel segments, with one exception, the room rate. This study found that the impact size of the room rate is significantly larger for luxury hotels compared to other hotel segments. Managerial implications and contributions of the current study are discussed.