Word-of-Mouth Amplified – An Exploration of Hotel Customer Feedback Websites

Marketing has always advocated a customer orientation but the reality in many companies has been different. Businesses have always known that word‐of‐mouth is an important element of marketing, but only since the emergence of Web 2.0 have businesses realised that with the power of the Internet word‐of‐mouth can have now have a reach that is far beyond the traditional use. An example of how word‐of‐mouth can be amplified are hotel booking sites that provide user generated feedback and ratings of hotels. This is an emerging area and conventions of how this feedback is generated and how the feedback can be interpreted is rising. An analysis of the most popular hotel sites showed that a feedback function is now a standard feature and that sites have started to provide links to social networking sites such as Facebook to further enable amplified word‐of‐mouth