Analysis of the relationship between social media management and eWOM: an exploratory study of the hotel sector

Abstract

[eng] Nowadays, most of the travelers look for the experiences and recommendations that other tourists have shared on social media platforms before booking their trips. As a consequence, positive and negative travelers’ online reviews have a direct impact on tourism companies’ incomes. The main objective of this study is to analyze how hotels manage all these comments and reviews posted on social media platforms in order to influence their potential customers positively and increase their room’s bookings. So that reaching this goal, the Facebook sites of thirty 4-star and 3-star hotels from a touristic Spanish destination (Mallorca) have been analyzed. The results of the study reveal that, even though most of the hotels understand the importance of having updated and complete Facebook sites in the room’s selling process, just a few of them invest time in interacting with travelers and they don’t make many efforts to manage the opinions tourists have shared. Consequently, hotels are missing one of the main opportunities that social media platforms and electronic word-of-mouth offer to increase revenues. Therefore, in this paper implications for the industry will be discussed.