Managerial responses to online reviews: Strategies should vary across different hotels

Last month, I published two journal articles about online reviews. The first one was about how managers of different hotels should use different strategies to respond to online reviews and published in The Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (with Karen Xie and Wei Wang). The second one was a review of current literature about online reviews and published in International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (with Karen Xie and Tori Richards).

I highlighted the important implications of these two journal articles on Multibriefs.com. For example, I recommend that responses to online reviews should vary based on hotel class. In particularly:

Budget traveler hotels — provide more but also more concise (shorter) responses by the executives.

Mid-market economy hotels — provide more responses by the executives.

Full-service hotels — provide more responses by the executives in a timely manner.

Above-average hotels — provide more and longer responses by the functional managers (e.g., front desk manager, sales manager, etc.) and reply in a timely manner.

Luxury hotels — provide more and longer responses by the functional managers.

In the literature review paper, we pointed out what we know and what we don't know about online reviews. Particularly, I would like to see what you want to know about online reviews. Maybe your comments will inspire more research studies in the future to help us further advance our knowledge about online reviews.

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