Exploring the Potential of Travel Reviews

This research contribution aims to analyze the potential of travel reviews and to identify e-marketing strategies for tourism and travel firms. Travel reviews are a form of user-generated content reporting consumer experiences and represent online feedback mechanisms with considerable implications for strategic marketing. The current study aims to explore the concepts of delightful and terrible experiences and to uncover the factors influencing the nature of e-word-of-mouth messages. The analysis demonstrates that travel reviews can contribute to innovative relationship management approaches with inferences on strategy formulation and implementation. Guest opinions can generate more comprehensive understanding of customers, support market segmentation and innovation processes, and promote the pursuit of business excellence in tourist destinations. This contribution highlights the importance of implementing pro-active marketing strategies for managing online communication channels, since user-generated content influences the online reputation of firms and destinations as well as consumer decision-making processes. The chapter also reports guidelines for monitoring, responding or acting on guest reviews. Recommendations are formulated to integrate e-marketing strategies with the principles of customer participation to enhance reputation-building processes.