Influence of prior reviews about a firm and its alliance partners on reviewers' feedback: evidence from the airline industry

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore the impact of other customer's opinion on a service firm and its alliance on the evaluation of the airline by the focal customer by integrating qualitative and quantitative user-generated content. The study also explores the relative importance of core and peripheral attributes in consumer evaluations.Design/methodology/approachA text mining and natural language processing-based approach was followed to extract insights from the qualitative part of 18,457 consumer reviews, which were later analyzed along with the quantitative information obtained from the reviews using linear regression and logistic regression methods.FindingsThe authors found that customer satisfaction and recommendation behavior is formed by own and others' opinion about the airline and alliance. The relative importance of the core and peripheral attributes depends on the psychological distance from the evaluation of the attribute.Research limitations/implicationsThe theoretical contribution and managerial implications have been discussed in detail.Practical implicationsIt helps in review management strategy, service design strategy and the alliance and partnership strategies of the airlines.Originality/valueThis is the first paper that explores the impact attribute-level evaluations found in prior reviews on the future reviews of customers. It also explores the effect of prior reviews in the context of a service business and its alliances.

Air-Travelers’ Perceptions of Service Quality during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Tripadvisor Sites

“…In our findings, food was mentioned in a positive tone among passengers. Our findings are consistent with the study conducted by Chatterjee et al [91], who found strong positive sentiments about food and beverages. Focusing on the full-service airlines, Siering et al's [57] research found that food as an augmented service aspect is evaluated much more positively in the passengers' online reviews.…”

Misery loves company: evaluation of negative e-WOM effects at the post-service recovery stage

“…Yet in the case of critical services such as doctors, customers improve their ratings when prior reviews are highly positive (Kordzadeh, 2019). Thus, a customer's perception of a service is a function of personal experience and others' online opinions (Chatterjee et al, 2021). However, if a customer's perception of the service quality is high, the detrimental effect of negative e-WOM can be negated significantly (Su et al, 2022).…”

“…The usefulness of negative reviews is also contingent upon the product type, where negative e-WOM of a product with high environmental impact is perceived as more useful, leading to a more negative product attitude (Filieri et al ., 2021a). While studies have focused primarily on the persuasive impact of negative e-WOM on customers with no experience with the product or service, few studies have assessed the effects of prior experience in customers' processing of negative e-WOM (Qahri-Saremi and Montazemi, 2022; Chatterjee et al ., 2021; Su et al ., 2022).…”

“…Yet in the case of critical services such as doctors, customers improve their ratings when prior reviews are highly positive (Kordzadeh, 2019). Thus, a customer’s perception of a service is a function of personal experience and others' online opinions (Chatterjee et al. , 2021).…”