BU Research Blog

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol.80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2019.02.012

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The informational value of online employee reviews in tourism and hospitality research and practice. Online reviews can complement existing approaches offering access in a pool of opinion highly representative of the industry. The results of our analysis reveal that the unstructured form of reviews through topic analysis can efficiently capture important topics for employees and is in agreement with previous literature. As such it opens new avenues for researchers and practitioners since the intangible and heterogeneous nature of tourism and hospitality services can be measured with more direct data sources available to the decision makers, than cross-sectional questionnaires.
An interesting insight for managers in these industries is that the adaptation of management practices and improvement initiatives needs to be adjusted vertically (across business units) rather than horizontally (across the organization). The results of the analysis also provide an argument against the “one size fits all” approach (Hom, Lee, Shaw, & Hausknecht, 2017) in the management of service employees across tourism and hospitality industries and as such the incorporation of insights from satisfaction surveys in managerial practices need to be adjusted accordingly.