TOURISM MANAGEMENT

Exploring the impact of personalized management responses on tourists’ satisfaction: A topic matching perspective

Zhang, Xiaowei; Qiao, Shuchen; Yang, Yang; Zhang, Ziqiong

Abstract

As an online reputation management tool, hotel managers increasingly rely on management responses to online reviews to improve the electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Due to the substantial heterogeneity of textual reviews with different topics, it is particularly challenging to personalize the response for customer relationship management. Based on a panel data of 500 hotels in the state of Texas collected from TripAdvisor, this study examines the influence of personalized management responses on rating increase from a topic matching perspective. The empirical results show that (1) a high level of topic matching of management response leads to an increase of hotel online rating; (2) a high valence and a large variation of existing rating weaken the positive influence of such personalized management response; (3) the influence is stronger for economy hotels compared to luxury ones. Lastly, practical implications are provided.

Keywords

Management response; Topic matching; Hotel online review; Online rating; Supported vector machines classification

Research topic

AI and Big Data, Digital Platform and Pricing

Research method

Econometrics, Big Data

Geographic area

US

Additional links for this paper

ResearchGate

Publisher Website

Web of Science

HOW TO CITE

Zhang, X., Zhang, Z., Yang, Y., and Qiao, S. (2020). Exploring the impact of personalized management responses on tourists’ satisfaction: A topic matching perspective. Tourism Management, 76, 103953.

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