“Please write a (great) online review for my hotel!” Guests’ reactions to solicited reviews

Abstract

With the aim of enhancing their online reputation, several hospitality businesses have started soliciting their guests to write online reviews. Available studies have not yet evaluated the effects of this strategy. To fill this knowledge gap, this study draws on the theory of psychological reactance and investigates guests’ attitudinal and behavioral reactions to received solicitations. Evidence collected from a sample of Italian travelers indicates that soliciting reviews has both benefits and drawbacks: It increases the number of reviews for the business, but it also irritates a significant share of guests. Particularly high levels of irritation arise when a business explicitly asks its guests to write positive reviews. The implications of these findings for the reputation management strategy of hospitality businesses are discussed.

Keywords

eWOM online reviews reactance reputation management review solicitation user-generated reviews

Introduction

As the success of hospitality businesses increasingly depends on their online reputation (Baka, 2016), managers are exploring suitable strategies to influence electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM) (Tsao et al., 2015). In addition to the well-established activity of responding to (poor) reviews (Levy et al., 2013; O’Connor, 2010; Sparks et al., 2016; Xie et al., 2014), recent research (Gössling et al., 2016) has documented the increasing popularity of new strategies to manipulate online reviews. These forms of manipulation include writing fake reviews (Anderson and Simester, 2014), offering guests monetary and nonmonetary compensation to remove negative reviews (Cheng and Loi, 2014), and paying professional raters to post reviews (Filieri, 2015b).

Among the new manipulation strategies, the solicitation of reviews from guests is gaining prominence in hospitality businesses (Gössling et al., 2016). Review sites, such as TripAdvisor, consider review solicitation a fair practice as long as guests are not approached selectively (i.e. satisfied guests are not the only guests solicited) and as long as the valence of the reviews is not biased (i.e. guests are not explicitly asked to write positive reviews) (TripAdvisor, 2015). Nonetheless, hospitality managers are aware that the infringement of these rules is difficult to detect. This awareness may partly explain the popularity of this strategy (Gössling et al., 2016).

Academic studies have analyzed the phenomenon of review solicitation by adopting a conceptual perspective (Baka, 2016) or collecting qualitative evidence from hospitality managers (Gössling et al., 2016). No previous study has empirically investigated the reaction of guests who receive such solicitations. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap and to contribute to an understanding of the overall effectiveness of the review solicitation strategy.

Although available studies have suggested that soliciting online reviews improves the overall online reputation of a hospitality business (Baka, 2016), guests who receive such a solicitation may react negatively, thus calling into question the effectiveness of this strategy. People who write online reviews are often proud of their impartiality and freedom (Casaló et al., 2015), and they may perceive direct solicitations as restrictions of this freedom. As posited by the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966; Brehm and Brehm, 1981), a person in this situation may experience a state of emotional reaction and may be highly motivated to restore this restricted freedom. Thus, that person may develop a negative attitude toward the source of the solicitation and resist the solicitation (Brehm, 1966; Brehm and Brehm, 1981).

Drawing on this theoretical framework, this study investigates the reaction of guests who receive solicitations from hospitality businesses to write (positive) online reviews. Specifically, the analysis covers both the attitudinal effects (i.e. the attitude developed toward the hospitality business that made the solicitation) and the consequent behavioral outcomes (i.e. the actual behavior of writing or not writing the review). By directly approaching guests who experienced review solicitation, this research will also provide an overview of the reach of this phenomenon.

The findings of this study will also offer hospitality managers new insights into the effects of the review solicitation strategy. By combining available conceptual knowledge with this new evidence about the reactions of solicited guests, managers will be able to make more informed decisions about the adoption of the review solicitation strategy.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. First, the background for this study is introduced, and the hypotheses are developed. Then, the methods and the results are presented. A discussion and conclusions complete the article.

Background

The increasing popularity of online reviews (or user-generated reviews) has produced significant challenges for hospitality businesses (Baka, 2016; Oskam and Zandberg, 2016; Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). The purchase of hospitality products is a complex decision that requires an intensive informational search, given that their nature makes it difficult to evaluate their quality before consumption (Filieri and McLeay, 2014). To reduce the uncertainty and risk related to this purchase, guests increasingly rely on online reviews (Park and Nicolau, 2015), because they regard them as the most trusted sources of information (Filieri, 2015a). Therefore, online reviews strongly influence guests’ purchase decisions (Filieri, 2015a; Tanford and Montgomery, 2015) and, in turn, have the potential to affect hotel performance (Phillips et al., 2016). Previous studies have shown that both the overall volume of reviews and the share of positive reviews have direct impacts on purchase intentions (Ladhari and Michaud, 2015; Tsao et al., 2015), prices (Torres et al., 2015), and sales (Phillips et al., 2015; Xie et al., 2014) (for a detailed review, see also Cantallops and Salvi (2014)).

Therefore, it is not surprising that a detailed analysis of articles examining online reviews in tourism and hospitality published in academic journals between 2004 and 2013 (Schuckert et al., 2015) reveals two main research priorities: assessing the impact of online reviews on guests’ buying behavior and understanding how hospitality businesses should manage online reviews. In particular, hospitality managers are increasingly concerned with enhancing both the number and the positive valence of reviews for their businesses (Gössling et al., 2016). Nonetheless, available review management strategies and their effectiveness remain largely unexplored (Nguyen and Coudounaris, 2015; Schuckert et al., 2015).

In addition to traditional strategies, such as responding to negative reviews on online platforms (Cheng and Loi, 2014; Xie et al., 2016), several studies have documented the increasing popularity of online review manipulation strategies, defined as “any attempt to deliberately control or influence online reputation, either with regard to one’s own business or that of a competitor” (Gössling et al., 2016: 5). Managers can influence online content by manipulating several agents or actors (platforms, staff, guests, friends, or commercial raters). For example, managers can directly engage in fake reviews or can contact guests to encourage them to remove negative reviews and offer them compensation (Gössling et al., 2016).

Among the available manipulation strategies, soliciting guests to write (positive) reviews is increasingly attracting the interest of hospitality managers (Gössling et al., 2016). Indeed, several academic studies suggest that hospitality managers should solicit online reviews either from guests in general (Baka, 2016) or only from satisfied guests (e.g. Levy et al., 2013; Sparks et al., 2013). Interestingly, the most important review sites usually consider review solicitation a fair practice, but only if it is not applied selectively. For example, TripAdvisor (2015) states that “attempts by an owner or agent of a property to boost the reputation of a business by […] selectively soliciting reviews (by email, surveys or any other means) only from guests who have had a positive experience [are] fraudulent and thus subject to penalties.” They also remark that it is not acceptable to offer incentives in exchange for reviews or to explicitly solicit positive reviews (TripAdvisor, 2015). Nonetheless, evidence from qualitative research shows that several hospitality managers actively solicit their (satisfied) guests to write (positive) online reviews (Gössling et al., 2016), although a quantitative estimation of the reach of this phenomenon is not yet available.

Despite the increasing relevance of this strategy, the reactions of customers who receive solicitations to post online reviews have not been investigated. To fill this gap, this study relies on the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966; Brehm and Brehm, 1981). This theory posits that people respond negatively to attempts to influence them (Brehm, 1989). Specifically, when an individual’s freedoms are threatened or lost, that individual will experience a state of psychological reaction that encourages her/him to restore the particular freedoms that are threatened (Brehm and Brehm, 1981). This reaction results in both attitudinal and behavioral effects (Rains, 2013). In fact, the individual will develop a negative attitude (that may even become hostility) toward the source that has threatened that behavioral freedom and will then implement the behaviors needed to regain her/his freedom (Brehm, 1989). This framework is applicable not only to physical threats but also to feeling states, such as when an individual feels that it is difficult to make a preferred decision due to external pressures (Shen, 2015).

The intensity of the reaction depends on both the individual’s personality characteristics and situational factors (Quick et al., 2015). With regard to individual characteristics, each person is characterized by a certain level of reactance proneness, which reflects the level of a person’s need for autonomy and independence (Quick et al., 2015). Reactance proneness is a personality trait; therefore, it is stable over time, and its level does not vary depending on the situation (Donnell et al., 2001). When a freedom is restricted, reactance proneness activates the reaction to restore the lost freedom (Shen, 2015). The magnitude of the reaction is also influenced by situational factors. In particular, stronger threats (Brehm and Brehm, 1981; Edwards et al., 2002) and threats that contradict an individual’s well-formed behavioral intentions (Fitzsimons and Lehmann, 2004) elicit more intense reactions.

Since the 1970s, the theory of psychological reactance has been applied to understand consumer reactions to promotional influence, manipulative advertising and other marketing, and communication stimuli (Clee and Wicklund, 1980). Recent studies that draw upon this theory have examined consumer reactions to stimuli such as the forced viewing of pop-up ads on the Internet (Edwards et al., 2002), unsolicited product recommendations (Fitzsimons and Lehmann, 2004), highly personalized commercial e-mail solicitations (White et al., 2008), frontline service employees’ attempts to influence customers’ evaluation of their satisfaction (Jones et al., 2014), and product placement in movies (Marchand et al., 2015). This body of research suggests that, as stated by the theory of psychological reactance, influence attempts arouse consumers’ negative attitude toward the source of the restriction and consumers’ behavioral efforts to restore their restricted freedom.

Drawing on this background, the next section develops hypotheses regarding attitudinal and behavioral reactions of customers who receive solicitations to write (positive) online reviews from hospitality businesses.

Hypotheses

Several hospitality studies have highlighted that guests who write reviews engage in voluntary behavior by reporting their genuine experiences to help future travelers (Schuckert et al., 2015; Qu and Lee, 2011). Guests who contribute online reviews highly value their freedom (Casaló et al., 2015). In some cases, they may even decide to write reviews to exercise collective power over companies (Gretzel and Yoo, 2008). Hence, previous hospitality research (Casaló et al., 2015) has highlighted that particular care should be taken to maintain the impartiality of the reviews and the reviewers’ freedom to write about the hospitality business. This recommendation is consistent with the findings of previous analyses from related fields of study. For example, research on social media has demonstrated that blogs that solicit participants by directive questioning are less successful than blogs that allow participants to express themselves freely (Balagué and De Valck, 2013).

Considering the high level of importance that guests attach to their freedom (Casaló et al., 2015), we suggest that their decision to engage in writing reviews should not be forced. Soliciting guests who do not spontaneously decide to write a review will trigger their reaction. Consistent with the theory of psychological reactance, in this study, guests’ reactions are modeled as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The conceptual model.

The main model highlights that the reaction to solicitation will depend on a guest’s level of reactance proneness. Previous research has shown that influence attempts elicit feelings of irritation toward the source of influence (Edwards et al., 2002). Moreover, the magnitude of this attitudinal reaction is directly dependent on a person’s level of reactance proneness (Marchand et al., 2015). In turn, the more intense the attitudinal reaction, the stronger the behavioral reaction (i.e. the effort to restore the restricted freedom) (Brehm, 1989). Therefore, reactance proneness only indirectly influences the decision to write or not to write a review through the mediating effect of irritation.

Hence, we hypothesize the following:

H1: Reactance proneness has a negative effect on the decision to write (or not to write) a review, and this effect is fully mediated by irritation.

Our conceptual model highlights the additional impact of situational factors on the attitudinal reaction. As suggested by recent studies (Gössling et al., 2016), guests may receive an explicit solicitation to write a positive review rather than a general solicitation to write one. In this case, the guest will perceive a stronger threat to her/his freedom because the hospitality business attempts to influence not only the guest’s decision to write a review but also the valence of the review.

Moreover, when a person receives a recommendation that counters her/his previously formed attitude, he/she is likely to ignore the recommendation and becomes irritated with the source of the solicitation (e.g. Fitzsimons and Lehmann, 2004). This phenomenon occurs because a counterattitudinal recommendation is perceived as a stronger threat to personal freedom and thus elicits stronger reactance (Brehm and Brehm, 1981). At the time when they receive the solicitation, some of the guests may not have developed the intention to write an online review. Therefore, since the level of irritation is directly related to the strength of the threat (Brehm and Brehm, 1981; Edwards et al., 2002), we suggest the following:

H2a: A guest’s level of irritation (with the hospitality business that solicited the review) will be higher in the case of an explicit solicitation to write a positive review than in the case of a neutral solicitation to write a review.

H2b: This effect will be higher among those guests who had not developed the intention to write a review.

Methods

A questionnaire-based survey was conducted among a sample of Italian travelers. Because it was not possible to identify in advance travelers who had been solicited by hospitality businesses at least once to write online reviews, the sample for this study was created according to the following procedure. We personally contacted bloggers who belong to the Italian Association of Travel Bloggers, introducing them to our research project and asking for their collaboration to post a link to our online questionnaire on their blogs. Three bloggers (“Vagabondo La Tana Del Viaggiatore Indipendente”; “Mi prendo e mi porto via”; “Fraintesa”) agreed to support our research and wrote posts on their blogs, inviting their followers to participate in a study about their attitudes toward online reviews by clicking through the link to our questionnaires. The first of the three posts was published in October 2015, and the last one was published at the beginning of January 2016. The entire data collection process ended in January 2016.

As a result of this procedure, we recruited 349 participants. In the posts and in the introduction to the questionnaire, the participants were informed that the study intended to gain a general understanding of travelers’ attitudes toward online reviews. All participants were first asked several introductory questions about their experience with travels, hotels, and restaurants and about their attitudes and behavior related to online reviews (such as review writing, reading, and trusting). Then the participants were asked whether they had been solicited at least once by a restaurant and/or a hotel to write an online review. Those who answered yes (185 people) represented the final sample used in this study, whereas those who answered no (164 people) were presented with a different questionnaire for the purpose of another study.

Five constructs were measured to test the hypotheses. First, each participant’s level of reactance proneness was registered using three items from Dowd et al. (1991) on 7-point agree–disagree scales: If I am told what to do, I often do the opposite; I am not very tolerant of others’ attempts to persuade me; I resent people who try to tell me what to do. The resulting scale showed a composite reliability value of 0.72 and a Cronbach’s α value of 0.71, thus exceeding the suggested level of 0.70 (Bagozzi and Yi, 2012).

Then each respondent was asked to think about the most recent solicitation she/he had received from a hotel or from a restaurant and to answer questions regarding her/his previous intention to write a review (yes or no), the valence of the received solicitation (neutral solicitation or solicitation to write a positive review), and the behavioral reaction (writing or not writing the review). Finally, consistent with previous research (Edwards et al., 2002; Morimoto and Chang, 2006), each participant’s attitudinal reaction toward the source of solicitation was measured through her/his level of irritation. Drawing on a study by Edwards et al. (2002), the level of irritation was registered through an individual’s level of agreement (on 7-point scales) with the following four items: irritating, annoying, phony, and intrusive. For this scale, both composite reliability and Cronbach’s α had a value of 0.96, indicating that the internal consistency was met. Questions regarding the respondents’ demographic information completed the questionnaire.

To test the hypotheses, the following procedure was adopted. First, we used the structural equation modeling technique to estimate the main model linking reactance proneness to the behavioral reaction (writing or not writing the review) through irritation (hypothesis 1). Then, we examined the effects of the valence of solicitation (neutral or positive) and of previous intention (yes or no) on the attitudinal reaction (irritation) using a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) (hypotheses 2a and b).

Results

Of the 349 people who participated in this study, 185 (53.0%) reported that at least once a hotel or a restaurant explicitly asked them to write a review on TripAdvisor, Google Maps, or similar websites. Table 1 shows the profiles of the participants. People who received a solicitation at least once were mainly aged 26–45, with a high level of education and with average high frequencies of eating at restaurants and staying at hotels.

Table 1.

Profiles of the participants.

Dimension	Items	Frequencies (all participants, n = 349)	Frequencies (only participants who received solicitations, n = 185)
Gender	F	197 (56.4%)	107 (57.8%)
	M	152 (43.6%)	78 (42.2%)
Age	<25	90 (25.8%)	39 (21.1%)
	26–35	118 (33.8%)	71 (38.4%)
	36–45	94 (26.9%)	52 (28.1%)
	46–55	37 (10.6%)	21 (11.3%)
	56–65	8 (2.3%)	2 (1.1%)
	>65	2 (0.6%)	0 (0%)
Education	Less than high school	3 (0.9%)	2 (1.1%)
	High school degree	80 (22.9%)	38 (20.5%)
	University degree (bachelor’s and/or master’s degree)	209 (59.9%)	115 (62.2%)
	Postgraduate degree	57 (16.3%)	30 (16.2%)
Occupation	Student	89 (25.5%)	39 (21.1%)
	Employed	159 (45.5%)	84 (45.4%)
	Self-employed	83 (23.8%)	50 (27.0%)
	Unemployed	16 (4.6%)	12 (6.5%)
	Others	2 (0.6%)	0 (0%)
Average frequency of eating at restaurants (either for leisure or for business)	Less than once a month	13 (3.7%)	2 (1.1%)
	1–2 times per month	108 (31.0%)	48 (25.9%)
	3–4 times per month	113 (32.4%)	61 (33.0%)
	5–10 times per month	81 (23.2%)	49 (26.5%)
	More than 10 times per month	34 (9.7%)	25 (13.5%)
Average frequency of staying at hotels (either for leisure or for business)	Less than once a year	5 (1.4%)	1 (0.5%)
	Once a year	66 (18.9%)	17 (9.2%)
	2–5 times per year	179 (51.3%)	96 (51.9%)
	6–10 times per year	47 (13.5%)	33 (17.9%)
	>10 times per year	52 (14.9%)	38 (20.5%)

Of the 185 respondents who experienced review solicitations, the vast majority received such solicitations several times (Table 2). Considering that 53% of the participants reported having been solicited at least once by a hotel or a restaurant and that most of them were solicited several times, review solicitation emerges as a popular practice in the hospitality industry.

Table 2.

Descriptive statistics about participants’ experiences with review solicitation (n = 185).

Questions	Items	Frequencies
How frequently have you received such invitations?	Just once	31 (16.8%)
	Several times	143 (77.2%)
	Many times	11 (6.0%)
Did you receive these invitations	Only from hotels	82 (44.3%)
	More from hotels than from restaurants	37 (20.0%)
	More from restaurants than from hotels	50 (27.0%)
	Only from restaurants	16 (8.7%)
Were you (mostly) invited	Through one or more solicitation e-mails	42 (22.7%)
	Personally at the end of your stay/dinner	138 (74.6%)
	In other ways (please specify)	5 (2.7%)
Were these invitations accompanied by any form of incentive (small gifts, discounts, etc.)?	No	177 (95.7%)
	Yes (please specify)	8 (4.3%)

Participants were solicited more frequently by hotels than by restaurants; 74.6% of the participants were personally invited to write a review at the end of their dinner or their stay. E-mail solicitations were less popular. Only a few people reported other ways of receiving invitations, such as being given a business card with a list of review sites and a request to write a review or being shown a poster promising a free breakfast for those who wrote a review for the business. In a few cases, the solicitations were accompanied by incentives, including gifts (bottles of wine, T-shirts, free breakfasts) and monetary discounts.

Participants were then asked to refer to the most recently received solicitation. Thinking of their experience at the hotel or restaurant where they received the most recent solicitation, respondents reported a medium-high level of satisfaction (3.90 on a 5-point Likert-type scale, with extremes of very unsatisfied–very satisfied). Of the participants, 62.2% received the solicitation from a hotel, and 37.8% received the solicitation from a restaurant. Moreover, 20.5% of them were explicitly asked to write a positive review, whereas the remaining 79.5% received a neutral solicitation to write a review for the business. Table 3 summarizes the respondents’ behavioral and attitudinal reactions to the solicitation. Only 19 participants reported that they had no previous intention of writing a review but decided to write it after the invitation.

Table 3.

Reaction to the solicitation to write a review.

Intention to write the review before the solicitation	Behavioral reaction to the solicitation
Intention to write the review before the solicitation	Wrote the review (n = 106)	Did not write the review (n = 79)
Yes (n = 87)	n = 87 (2.96)^a	n = 0
No (n = 98)	n = 19 (2.61)^a	n = 79 (4.55)^a

^aValues of irritation between parentheses.

The first hypothesis suggested that reactance proneness has a negative effect on the intention to write a review and that this effect is mediated by irritation. The results of the structural model estimation (see Figure 2) showed good model fit. In detail, χ ² was 38.33, with df = 18. The value of χ ²/df was 2.13, below the threshold of 3 (Kline, 2011). Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and Goodness of Fit Index (GFI) were 0.98 and 0.95, respectively, and above the recommended cutoff of 0.93 (Bagozzi and Yi, 2012). Finally, the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) was 0.07 (p _close > 0.05), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) was 0.03, within the threshold of 0.07 (Bagozzi and Yi, 2012).

Figure 2.

The estimation of the structural model.

With regard to the structural effects, the findings support hypothesis 1, which stated that reactance proneness has a negative effect on the decision to write (or not to write) a review and that this effect is mediated by irritation. In detail, reactance proneness has a direct effect on irritation (β = 0.443, p < 0.01), and irritation has a direct effect on the decision to write a review (β = −0.438, p < 0.01). In addition, reactance proneness has no direct impact on the decision to write a review. Hence, hypothesis 1 is supported.

Hypotheses 2a and b were tested via a two-way ANOVA, with irritation as the dependent factor and valence of solicitation (neutral or positive) and previous intention to write (yes or no) as the independent factors. The results of the analysis (Table 4) show that the valence of solicitation has a significant effect (F = 28.665, p < 0.01), which means that guests experience higher irritation when they are asked to write a positive review than in the case of a neutral solicitation to write a review. Therefore, hypothesis 2a is supported. On the contrary, the findings reveal that the two-way interaction effect is not significant (F = 1.728, p > 0.10), showing that the level of irritation of guests who receive an explicit solicitation to write a positive review is the same regardless of the previous intention to write the review. Hence, hypothesis 2b is not supported.

Table 4.

Results of the two-way ANOVA.

Variables	Sum of squares	F	p
Valence of solicitation	84.707	28.665	<0.01
Previous intention to write	53.246	18.019	<0.01
Valence of solicitation × previous intention to write	5.107	1.728	>0.10

ANOVA: analysis of variance.

Discussion

Theoretical implications

The findings of this study enrich previous analyses that have suggested that hospitality managers should solicit online reviews from their guests (e.g. Baka, 2016; Levy et al., 2013; Sparks et al., 2013) but have not measured the output of this marketing strategy. Our results show mixed effectiveness for review solicitation. More precisely, the results indicate that a minor, but not unimportant, share of solicited guests without the previous intention to write a review decide to comply with the solicitation. At the same time, the collected evidence shows relevant negative attitudinal effects on a large portion of guests. Therefore, soliciting reviews increases the number of reviews for the business but at the expense of irritating a significant share of guests. This irritation may also have negative effects on guests’ loyalty toward the hotel or the restaurant and on their off-line word-of-mouth.

These results corroborate recent research by Casaló et al. (2015) that encourages hospitality businesses to preserve the impartiality of reviews and reviewers’ freedom to write about the hospitality business. In particular, our research highlights that guests react particularly negatively to managers’ attempts to bias guests’ comments by suggesting that they write positive reviews for their business. Moreover, the results reinforce available findings about eWOM, suggesting that hospitality managers should act on the emotional bonds with guests to generate eWOM and underlining that guests are likely to engage in eWOM if the business is perceived to hold self-relevant values (Kim et al., 2015).

In addition, this research extends available knowledge on online review management (Schuckert et al., 2015) and manipulation strategies (Gössling et al., 2016). The collected evidence both demonstrates that the online review solicitation strategy is already very popular and provides details about current practices, such as the various ways used to solicit guests.

Finally, from a broader perspective, the results of this analysis provide evidence to fill the relevant gap highlighted by recent studies (e.g. Baka, 2016) about eWOM and reputation management in hospitality. Soliciting reviews is a suitable approach available to hospitality businesses to implement their eWOM and reputation strategies.

Managerial implications

Given the increasing impact of online reputation on guests’ behavior, several hospitality managers have chosen to solicit online reviews from their guests. This study identifies both the benefits and the drawbacks of this strategy. Active review solicitation has the potential to increase the number of reviews for a business. At the same time, this practice irritates a significant share of guests. Given that attitudes are antecedents of behaviors, we may anticipate that some of these customers may defect. Therefore, managers should be aware that soliciting their guests increases the number of reviews but also causes disaffection among a relevant share of their guests. Above all, managers should avoid explicitly asking their guests to write positive reviews. Instead, they could build an emotional bond with their guests because a strong emotional relationship is a predictor of guests’ intention to spontaneously engage in eWOM.

At a higher level, hospitality businesses should first design an overall strategy for managing their reputation and then select the marketing activities through which that strategy should be implemented (for a detailed overview of the process of reputation management in the hospitality industry, managers may refer to the model proposed by Baka (2016)). Therefore, when opting for review solicitations, hospitality businesses should ensure that this activity is consistent with the overall reputation objectives and strategies of the firm.

Conclusion

Encouraged by the need to actively manage their online reputation, hospitality businesses are experimenting with new strategies. In particular, recent research has documented that soliciting guests to write online reviews is becoming increasingly popular. This study has provided evidence about the effectiveness of this strategy, highlighting both advantages and drawbacks. Specifically, soliciting guests increases the number of reviews but also irritates a significant share of the solicited guests. Future studies may adopt a longitudinal perspective to understand whether these irritated guests are likely to defect.

Several limitations should be considered when interpreting the results of this research; these limitations suggest the need for future investigations in this field. First, because this was the first study to empirically evaluate the phenomenon of review solicitations, it was not possible to make comparisons. Conducting similar research in other countries could strengthen our knowledge in this field. Moreover, we did not explore guests’ characteristics that may explain, at least in part, their attitudinal and behavioral reactions to solicitations. The attempt to fill this gap creates a variety of research opportunities. Finally, this study was based on an analysis of the real previous experiences of guests, emphasizing the practical relevance of results. Future research may adopt experimental designs to carefully evaluate guests’ reactions to different solicitation techniques.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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