The Impact of Consumer’s Adaptation to the Creative Culture of Theme Parks on Review Usefulness

Abstract

In the era of information overload and repetitive reviews, there has been limited exploration into the influence of consumers’ cultural adaptation to creative symbols in theme parks on the usefulness of online reviews, which is significant for enhancing tourism experiences, targeted marketing, personalized services, and informed tourism choices. This study aims to bridge this gap by examining how cultural adaptation factors interact and impact the review usefulness, and by considering the role of cultural adaptation in simplifying information during consumer decision-making processes. Additionally, the study investigates how consumers’ decision reference points, represented by advanced ticket levels, moderate their attention to attribute consistency when evaluating the review usefulness. A sample of 5929 valid consumer reviews of Disney theme parks from 2019 to 2022 on Meituan.com is analyzed using latent semantic analysis and Tobit regression to test the proposed hypotheses. We find that high symbolic creativity reviews stimulate cultural adaptation and increase attention to service attributes when evaluating review usefulness. Moreover, advanced ticket levels do not moderate the usefulness of extremely negative reviews. However, they do have a moderating effect on the usefulness of extremely positive reviews, with the direction of moderation differing based on the levels of symbolic creativity.