Similarity and Consistency in Hotel Online Ratings across Platforms.

This paper adopts Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) to analyse similarity and consistency in online ratings. The data set comprises online ratings gathered from eleven online platforms from 1,165 hotels. Our results suggest that there is a similar pattern of online ratings across most of the analysed platforms, except for Yelp and HolidayCheck; in addition, the evaluation patterns of the analysed hotels are stable over time; furthermore, the analysed attributes do not contribute decisively to explain the overall evaluation of an hotel, which implies that consumers use a non-compensatory evaluation model regardless of platform. Our results show that there is no difference between the evaluation patterns between the platforms that insist on prior reservations being made and those that do not. Two main implications are derived from this research: SOMs are shown to be useful tools for simplifying visual representations, and tourism online platforms are trustworthy sources of information. The results have been confirmed by means of two qualitative studies, a focus group with hotel managers and an in-depth interview with the manager of the dataset provider.