A Study on Effect of Travel and Tourism-Related Online Reviews Based on UGC

摘要

Electronic word-of-mouth of online reviews and consumer-generated content in particular play an important role in the travel and tourism sector. The impact of online reviews on consumer behavior and sales has been widely assessed in the last years but not much attention has been paid to the traveler’s decision-making process. This paper aims to explore the effect of online consumer reviews on traveler’s decision process by an empirical study. We separate the function of informing and recommending of the on-line consumer reviews, to explore which function and how it would influence the travel destination decision-making process, which will directly lead to the variation of the amount of tourist to the destination. The results shows that, only the impact of tourism-related online review’s volume on the amount of tourist is significant, which means the informing effect is significant but the effect of recommending is not.