Does interest alignment between hotels and online travel agencies intensify review manipulations?

Abstract

Purpose

This study examines whether a higher interest alignment between online travel agencies (OTAs; hosting platform) and hotels (business owners) will intensify review manipulation activities.

Design/methodology/approach

With a panel data set collected from a Chinese online travel agency and a travel search engine, the authors develop a matching-based difference-indifference approach to examine the presence of partnership-intensified review manipulation.

Findings

The authors find that the ratings of agency's partner hotels (with a higher interest alignment) are abnormally higher than those of matched non-partner hotels (with a lower interest alignment), after they are benchmarked with their ratings on the search engine (without a partnership business model). Further, the analysis results indicate that this partnership-intensified manipulation deteriorates the hotel's sales performance because of damaged customer trust and satisfaction.

Originality/value

Previous studies implicitly assume that review manipulator is independent from the hosting platform. This is the first study examining the role of the hosting platform in review manipulations.

Citation

Chen, Y., Tang, T., Li, Y. and Fan, D. (2021), "Does interest alignment between hotels and online travel agencies intensify review manipulations?", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 121 No. 6, pp. 1435-1456. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-11-2020-0657