Managing reputation on TripAdvisor – a case study of Cracow’s hotel market

The aim of the study described in this article was to establish if there are any patterns in the way different Cracow hotels manage their online reputation by responding to online user reviews. Reputation was analysed by means of quantitative variables representing some dimensions of reputation. Characteristics of selected hotels were investigated to show how they influence the way in which hotels respond to online reviews posted by hotel guests. 1327 replies to over 4000 reviews were collected by a web scraping tool called ParseHub. The significance of differences among group means in a sample was checked by one-way ANOVA analysis of variance and HSD Tukey test. It was found that three independent variables - having a social media profile, being part of a hotel chain and the TripAdvisor user rating - were factors that significantly differentiated hotels’ response to online reviews. Some differences to findings of previous studies were also identified, primarily in terms of the effect of star ratings and the number of rooms. It was concluded that Cracow’s hotels are better at managing their online reputation than hotels operating in other local markets and that visibility was the dimension of reputation that received the most attention.