The impact of hotel reviews posted by guests on customers’ purchase process and expectations

From the first article published on the topic of electronic word-of-mouth – eWOM (Stauss, 1997) research has rapidly increased, underlining the importance of this phenomenon both in academic and in business context. The purchasing behaviour of the customer has increasingly changed with the development of new technologies. Then what was defined as word-of-mouth (WOM) traditionally (Arndt, 1967; Koenig, 1985) need to be reconsidered and studied on the basis of recent changes (Buttle, 1998; Breazeale, 2009). Electronic WOM through online reviews on specific website, companies’ websites, blogs and communities influences various steps of consumer decision making and purchasing process (Schindler and Bickart, 2005) and his expectations about the service. The objective of the paper is to study the impact that customer feedbacks/reviews posted on “non transactional” websites have on consumer decision making process and on tourist’s expectations in the hospitality industry, that is particularly affected by this new trend. Many travel services are now bought on the net using electronic distribution systems: flights, hotel stays, car rentals, etc. (Nielsen, 2010; PhoCusWright, 2010). Online reviews play a key role in purchasing travel services (Nielsen, 2010) and “non transactional” websites increase their traffic of 4% from 2007 to 2009 despite a decrease of transactional websites (OTA, company websites, etc.) (PhoCusWright, 2009). Therefore hotel companies should comprehend the way in which customer feedbacks influence other consumers’ decisions and expectations in order to develop specific marketing strategies that consider also the synergy among social media and the development of mobile technologies.