Luxury Hotel Services and eWOM Assessment: Hospitality Management in China

Purpose - This paper studies the Chinese hospitality sector in terms of its online users' word of mouth (WOM) on hotel staying experiences in five-star hotels of Beijing and Shanghai. Comparisons and analyses on the eWOM are made from three perspectives: online booking site vs. online meta-search site; Chinese hotels vs. foreign and Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan/Singapore (HMTS) hotels; and hotels in Beijing vs. hotels in Shanghai. These three perspectives respectively draw on the issues of incentive, cultural and operational, and geopolitical differences in the hospitality industry of China. Results and implications of this study are expected to make some contributions to the knowledge asset management of the hospitality industry by providing the most updated insights from the most vivid case of the emerging economies. Design/methodology/approach - Two Chinese travel websites are chosen for this study: ctrip.com, the country's most important travel-booking site with over 40 million members and a network of over 32,000 hotels worldwide, and daodao.com, one of the most popular meta-search sites among the Chinese, with more than 20 million members and over 40 million online ratings by real travellers. In total, data from 202 five-star hotels in Beijing and Shanghai (of which 109 in Beijing and 93 in Shanghai) are used, and hotels used on both websites are exactly the same ones. All ratings are on a scale of 1 to 5. The ratings were manually collected during August and September of 2010. Means difference and t-tests were conducted to test the hypotheses of the study. Originality/value - Current studies in hospitality management are mostly focused on developed countries, with few exceptions concerning developing countries, which are gaining growing importance. This study fills the void by examining the hotel industry of the biggest developing country-China. Moreover, despite the increasing importance of Internet to the hospitality industry, the existing literature is scarce on issues that examine the eWOM differences from traditional booking sites and meta-search sites. This study makes a contribution by studying the most important hotels in most important cities in China. Moreover, cultural factors in this study are drawn from the opposite direction from the majority of the literature, where cultural diversity lies in service receivers, while in this study the cultural diversity arises from the service providers. Practical implications - Managerial implications of luxury hotels in China are provided, which are useful for strategic and operational improvements for both Chinese and non-Chinese players in this sector. It is concluded that the online booking site tend to report better customer reviews compared with the meta-search site, which proves our hypothesis that the former is more incentive-driven and less independent as information provider. It has also been found that overall Chinese luxury hotels underperform their foreign counterparts in China, giving space for further development and improvement. In terms of the location difference, no significant eWOM difference was found between Beijing and Shanghai luxury hotels, which implies that difference in political and functional orientations does not necessarily lead to difference in service providing.