Tripadvisor and Customer Reviews

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- Self-enhancement

For consumers, the process of writing reviews can be rewarding because it lets them receive recognition for their contributions. It can come from inner feelings or the creative impulse (Yoo & Gretzel, 2008). The TripAdvisor is the great place for visitors to show off their work with great photos and beautiful words based on their experiences, like a successful travel experience. On the other hand, it may also be derived from satisfaction feeling for helping other visitors to solve problems and gain a perfect travel (Yoo & Gretzel, 2008). In TripAdvisor, below every review visitors generate, there will be a ‘vote’ button. And, once other travelers give helpful votes to the review, the reviewer can receive an email from TripAdvisor to thank for his/her attribution with points attached to the vote. With the points, reviewers are able to reach higher level for their TripAdvisor account and collect badges to show their unique knowledge.

- Emotion-sharing

When visitors feel grateful or terrible about one trip, they will want to share their satisfaction, or outlet the frustration about the travel experiences (Yoo & Gretzel, 2008). On the one hand, successful travel experience will give visitors motivation to speak out their joy with others. On the other hand, disappointed or anger experience will eager consumers to complain and reduce their intensive anxiety, which can help them to ease the bad feelings (Yoo & Gretzel, 2008). Therefore, travel review site is a good channel to consumers to express both of these feelings, like TripAdvisor. Unlike travel service providing companies, who will delete negative reviews for the reputation, TripAdvisor will show justice for every hotel without deleting any reviews as long as they meet the guideline. And, owners are not allowed to use inner-message to ask reviewers to delete reviews in TripAdvisor (TripAdvisor, 2017b).

- Altruistic concerns for others

Also, travelers will write reviews for hotels out of altruistic impulse to show concerns for other travelers. Just as contributing to Wikipedia, people are found to show a sense of unselfish in sharing their knowledge just for other’s sake, which is regarded as altruistic impulse (Yoo & Gretzel, 2008; Li & Bernoff, 2011). Therefore, sharing these experiences, either positive or negative can be out of the purpose to give helpful hints for other visitors to gain a better travel experience.

- Helping the service providers

At last, although most travelers are writing reviews to show their attitude toward hotels or restaurants, some are also keen on helping these properties to improve their product/service quality (Yoo & Gretzel, 2008).

Conclusion

This paper investigated the motivations for travelers to use TripAdvisor in two ways: seeking information for travel choices and creating reviews for different properties related to travel, especially hotels. On the one hand, consumers prefer to read a reviews site because of its quality of information credibility, time-saving and high quality of user experience. On the other hand, consumers will be motivated to create reviews because of self-enhancement, emotion-sharing, altruistic concerns for others and helping the service providers. By knowing these attributes, sites of travel reviews or any other products can improve the web design and functions to stay reliable and useable among visitors. And, it is also important for travel service providers (i.e. hotels, restaurants) to understand these behaviors, which enables them to improve their services to meet expectation or enhance what are considered as strengths of themselves to attract more visitors. Review site is a great platform for them to listen to customers and make improvement.

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