Reliability level in Tourists Recommendation Systems

[eng] Online recommendation and online reputation are becoming highly popular and crucial when planning to stay in a hotel. An increasing reliance on the online travel agency and user generated content as an information source when planning to stay in four or five stars hotels raises the need for more research into the reliability of the Online recommendations on online travel agency OTA’s and tourist social media related to four and five stars hotels category. Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the reliability level of online recommender systems relating to the hotels classification by comparing the most common online travel agency and touristic social media in Spain including TripAdvisor, booking.com, Expedia and hotels.com. Design/methodology/approach – For better result we have implementing a filter process by using specific websites to collect our data, we investigate three independent variables: the numerical rating of the review, the hotel categories and the geographic area. Using a sample of 100 hotels randomly selected. In order to reinforce our findings, we compared our study on three Spanish islands, Palma de Mallorca, Tenerife and Gran Canarias. The research design is presented with introduction, theoretical background, then data collection details and empirical study using excel and SPSS methodology for analyze the data and hypotheses, the final part focus on the results, discussion, then conclusions, limitation and future of research. Findings – The results indicated that online recommendation system is reliable with the four stars hotels classifications while it is negative with five stars hotels, some online recommendations system have a strong correlations with hotel stars classifications such as TripAdvisor and hotel.com. Research limitations/implications – large number of sample, new websites and new geographic area should be analyzed. Practical implications – The results provide fruitful managerial implications for both hotels managements, and researchers. the study showed that hotels need to manage important information regarding online reputation to gain the maximum support from the customers to cope the hotel classifications stars standard with new challenges in social media recommendation system. Originality/value – our work is a first study step towards understanding the reliability level in user-generated ratings in the context with four and five stars hotels classifications in Spain which is rapidly and unique market