Reviewers more likely to be positive after wait

Monday, October 29, 2018 - 09:21 StudyHall.Rocks

If you wait, your review will be more positive.

The room that smelled of cigars. The dog hair on the carpet. The clerk who snarled at your approach. For good reason, the review you write about the hotel where you stayed during vacation will be negative -- unless, that is, you wait a week to write it.

    When customers post a review immediately after their stay at a hotel, they are more negative about the experience, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia in England.
    As time goes by, they aren’t so hard on the place. “The sooner customers post a review the more they zoom-in on their experience, focusing on the more concrete aspects, even on small details, and the more negative they are,” according to the university’s press office. “As the time increases, reviewers zoom-out and have a more positive view, focusing instead on the general experience and more abstract aspects.”
    Hotels were the focus of this study. The research was expansive, analyzing more than 215,000 online reviews on the websites TripAdvisor and Booking.com by visitors from approximately 90 countries staying at 1,022 London hotels.
    Of course, many of us don’t trust reviews at all. Some have been copied and pasted, while others are overly negative or gushing. We use them anyhow. Reviews can help the buyer understand a product’s strengths and weaknesses.

The research is: "Exploring the Behavioral Drivers of Review Valence: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Multiple Psychological Distances," by Panagiotis Stamolampros and Nikolaos Korfiatis, published in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

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