Effects of the booking.com rating system: bringing hotel class into the picture

Mariani, M. M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7916-2576 and Borghi, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4150-1595 (2018) Effects of the booking.com rating system: bringing hotel class into the picture. Tourism Management, 66. pp. 47-52. ISSN 0261-5177 doi: 10.1016/j.tourman.2017.11.006

Abstract/Summary

The purpose of this study is to continue the discussion initiated by Mellinas et al. (2015, 2016) on the effects of the Booking.com rating system and more widely on the use of the OTA as a data source in academic tourism and hospitality research. We enrich and complement the original work by Mellinas et al. (2015) by empirically investigating the effects of the Booking.com rating system on the distribution of hotel ratings for the overall population of hotels located in London over two years. Based on more than 1.2 million online reviews, we show that the overall distribution of hotel scores is significantly left-skewed. Moreover, we find that the degree of skewness is positively associated with hotel class: lower-class hotels exhibit distributions of ratings that are statistically less skewed than higher-class hotels.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-pure-test.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/74560
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.tourman.2017.11.006
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Central Services Henley Business School > Leadership, Organisations and Behaviour Henley Business School > Digitalisation, Marketing and Entrepreneurship
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