Journal of Tourism & Hospitality
Open Access

Abstract

The Impact of Online Traveler Ratings with the Willingness of the Traveler to Recommend Hotels for Five Selected Cities in China

Keith H. Mandabach, Betsy Bender Stringam, Xingya MA, Dawn M Van Leeuwen and John J Gerdes

The purpose of this research is to provide hotel operators an opportunity to better understand the relationship between online traveler ratings for hotels and the traveler’s willingness to recommend the hotel for 16,597 online hotel user generated ratings collected for China’s major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Shenzhen and Tianjin. The results of the study show a stronger relationship between customer satisfaction rating and the willingness to recommend for hotel in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai than the other three cities. When hotels received the lowest customer satisfaction score, only 1.09% of people recommended the hotel to a friend. For hotels receiving a customer satisfaction score of 2 to 5, the recommended proportion was significantly associated with rating overall for hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin.