What Factors Make Online Travel Reviews Credible? The Consumers’ Credibility Perception-CONCEPT Model

Abstract

Online reviews have become a fundamental element in searching for and buying a tourism service. In particular, in the phase of post-pandemic caused by the COVID-19, social media are important channels of inspiration of dreams and encouragement to begin envisioning future trips. However, the growing trend of fake reviews is becoming a big issue for consumers. This study proposes and empirically validates a new model that enables predicting consumers’ Credibility Perception of Online Reviews (CPOR) related to tourism, considering all integrated factors of the communication process. A survey was carried out via a structured questionnaire. In particular, 615 answers from Italian travel groups were collected, and correlation and regression analyses were conducted. Results show that the website brand, advisor’s expertise, reviews’ sidedness and consistency, and consumer experience are significant predictors of CPOR. Website usability and reputation are instead weak predictors. This study provides the design and test of a credibility model, contributing to the theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature and enhancing the knowledge on consumer behavior.

What makes an online review credible? A systematic review of the literature and future research directions

“…Chih et al (2013) posit that in addition to the source credibility (reviewer expertise), consumers evaluate the quality of contents of a website based on website reputation, which in turn leads to higher trust on the website and higher perceived credibility of the review. Website reputation is defined as the extent to which consumers perceive the platform where the review is published to be believable and trustworthy (Chih et al 2013;Thomas et al 2019;Tran and Can 2020;Guzzo et al 2022;Majali et al 2022). Bae and Lee (2011) found that consumer-developed sites were perceived as more credible than marketer-developed sites.…”

“…Jimenez and Mendoza (2013); Gvili and Levy (2016) operationalize the level of detail as the amount of information present in the review about a product or service. Past studies have found evidence for the positive relationship between different attributes of reviews such as review objectivity (Luo et al 2015;Abedin et al 2021), level of detail (Jimenez and Mendoza 2013), review attribute (Lee and Koo 2012), message readability (Guzzo et al 2022), persuasiveness of eWOM messages (Tien et al 2018), interestingness (Shamuyenhanzva et al 2016, graphics (Fang and Li 2016) and suspicion of truthfulness (Zhang et al 2020) with review credibility. Vendemia (2017) found that the emotional content of information in the review also influences the review credibility.…”

“…Lim and Van Der Heide (2015) observed differences in the perceived credibility of users and non-users of the review platform and found an interaction effect between users' familiarity with the review platform and reviewer profile (number of friends and number of reviews) characteristics of review credibility. Consumer experience with online reviews affects their perception of review credibility (Guzzo et al 2022). Izogo et al (2022) posit that consumer experiences such as sensory, cognitive and behavioral experience also influences review credibility.…”