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Top1. Introduction
Online travel platforms provide consumers with increasingly efficient and convenient services given the rapid development of e-commerce and the maturity of mobile information technology (Lin et al., 2020; Ongusl and Nyamboga, 2019). Online hospitality bookings have become the preferred way for consumers to arrange accommodation issues when traveling (Li et al., 2020). A report released in May 2021 by 100EC's E-commerce Research Center shows, although affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the online travel market scale experienced negative growth in 2020, the user scale maintained steady growth, reaching 432 million people, up 4.6% year-on-year (100EC.com, 2021). Along with the maturity of the online platform and the continued engagement of consumers, online travel platforms have accumulated a large number of reviews published by consumers regarding experience and usage feelings on purchased travel products or services. Compared with commercial advertisements, online reviews are considered to be more reliable sources of information (Chen and Law, 2016). Hospitality provides a typical experience product, consumers cannot make an accurate assessment of its quality before usage (Zhang et al., 2018). Therefore, online hospitality reviews have become an important basis for consumers’ travel and hospitality booking decisions. Additionally, hospitality merchants can use online reviews to support their brand-building, customer relationship management, and service management activities (Liu et al., 2020a). The in-depth exploration of online reviews by online travel platforms could help them achieve accurate hospitality recommendations and provide high value-added services.
Online hospitality reviews play an increasingly important role in reducing the uncertainty of consumer decision making, grasping consumer feedback information for hospitality merchants, and improving information services for online travel platforms (Mekvabidze, 2018; Xiao et al., 2019). However, problems such as the lack of useful information, information overload, and reporting biases severely reduce the effectiveness of online hospitality reviews (Hu et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2020b). These factors are closely related to the design of online hospitality review systems, and a well-designed online hospitality review system can help solve such problems (Lalić, 2019). Through a review of the literature on online hospitality reviews and their systems we conclude that most past research has focused on the antecedents of online review posting and the impact of online review features, and in general there is a dearth of research targeting the design of online hospitality review systems. Although a small number of studies have begun to focus on the design of online review systems, they have largely considered single design feature (Davidavičienė et al., 2020). In general, in the extant studies there has not been a systematic deconstruction of the microscopic design features of the online hospitality review system from the perspective of system design.