Review content type and hotel review helpfulness: direct and moderating effects

Helpful online reviews can benefits customers with less stress from information overload and valuable cues for decision-making, and thus many scholars have discussed what the determinants of review helpfulness. However, limited studies explore how specific review content impacts review helpfulness especially in the hotel industry. Using a latent Dirichlet allocation method, we identified review content type regarding hotel attributes with five topics (room experience, location convenience, personalization & uniqueness, event management & staff attitude, and cleanliness & smell) by extracting dimensions from 166, 546 reviews on Ctrip.com. Then we explored the direct and moderating effects of review content type on review helpfulness. Our findings indicated that customers give the most weight to event management & staff attitude in hotel reviews, followed by personalization & uniqueness, cleanliness & smell, and location convenience/room experience. Moreover, the effects of some characteristics of reviews (e.g., review extremity, review photo) and reviewers (e.g., reviewer expertise, reviewer reputation) on review helpfulness vary in different types of review content. These findings could provide foundation on exploring the influence of specific review content on review helpfulness, as well as offer valuable guidelines for hotels to allocate resources effectively.