Recent advances in ICT has led to changes in the tourism sector, mainly in information dissemination and online reputation. Information no longer flows from suppliers to tourists, being the tourist, simultaneously an information consumer and an information creator or generator based on his tourism experience. Through networks, searches, and metasearch engines tourists can review and rate products and services and can access other users' information. They can access online content before, during, and after the trip. This information serves as a reference to choose the next destination to travel to, being much more influential than that generated by the tourism provider or the destination management office. As a case study, this chapter analyses online reputation of the hotel offer in the city of Porto (Portugal), the second most important city in the country, using information from Booking.com. Known as one of the most well-known search engines worldwide, Booking.com allows the guests to assess the hotel units they have stayed in, using seven different items, from staff to free Wi-Fi.
TopIntroduction
The internet and social media have changed the way individuals communicate and take decisions (Manaman, Jamali, & AleAhmad, 2016). More and more companies are using social media to interact with their clients and selling their services (He, Zha, & Li, 2013). That explains why companies, from various sectors, use these online media to manage and evaluate their reputation. Reputation is understood as “the perceptual representation of a company’s past actions and future prospects that describe the firm’s overall appeal to all its key elements when compared to other leading rivals” (Fombrun, 1996, p. 72). Therefore, they act as safety nets, and by developing their reputation, companies can reduce the stakeholders’ uncertainty about their capacity to create value (Rindova, Petkova, & Kotha, 2007). In other words, “reputation appears to be a fundamental extension of the organizational credibility whereby stakeholders evaluate past actions and records of behaviour” (Baka, 2016, p. 149).
All information spread through the internet is powerful, which justifies the need to design and use tools that can analyse and manage it. Besides, consumers usually review other consumers’ comments before making a purchase, and the level of confidence in these assessments is usually high (Manaman et al., 2016). It is not an isolated evaluation, since a single valuation can be biased, but rather thousands or millions of opinions about a certain product or service, where it is unlikely that the knowledge obtained from these social media is biased (Mostafa, 2013).
Until the rise of online markets, it was difficult for researchers to study reputation systems’ feedback. They were aware of the relevance of reputation and its influence on sales, hence the dangers of hidden information. Also, with internet transparency, understanding online reputation and feedback mechanisms became easier (Tadelis, 2016).
Reviews are at the core of online markets’ reputation systems. Products and services offered online, but also sellers, are reviewed by effective buyers enabling potential buyers to use this information to choose which products to buy, and with which sellers to interact. Quality incentives are also created, as buyers and sellers’ behaviour is made public (Luca, 2017).
Tourism is one of the sectors that has been highly affected by this framework. In fact, nowadays, no tourist or traveller makes a reservation or decides to travel to a tourism destination without reviewing other visitors’ opinions. It has become a common practice to check reviews and buy online tourism products and services, making search engines such as Booking.com or Trivago popular worldwide. With these tools, and similar ones, you can read thousands of comments on hotels, restaurants, vacation rentals or vacation packages. Other web portals, such as Minube, allow reading recommendations from other travelers as what to do, where to eat, where to stay or what to visit in a tourist destination.
Given the growing popularity of Porto as a tourism destination and consequential rising of online reviews and comments impacting significantly on the hotel market of Northern Portugal, this paper analyses the online comments of hotels in Porto, Portugal’s second biggest city and capital of the Northern region. The city is in the estuary of the Douro River in Northern Portugal. Being the largest city in the region, Porto is considered the economic and cultural heart of the whole region.
In this regard, we start by a theoretical review of the online reputation in the tourism industry and user generated content applied to this sector, since they are key variables within the online reputation. Then, we explain the goal of the study and the methodology used to develop the empirical work of the study. The aim of this work is to measure online hotel market reputation in the city of Porto. For this purpose, we have collected quantitative data in the evaluations by Booking.com of the hotels in the region concerned and analysed them. Finally, we have drawn the main findings of the research.