Cultural similarity and guest-host interaction for virtual tourism

Abstract

Online experience program is a novel virtual tourism product in which guests can experience interesting activities online. However, the mechanism behind guest-host interactions for online experience remains unexplored. From the perspective of cultural similarity, this study tries to discover how guests review differently to native hosts and foreign hosts, as well as how hosts reply differently to native guests and foreign guests. Based on the data collected from Airbnb, we conduct empirical analyses from the perspectives of guests and hosts separately. Our results show that guests tend to pay more efforts when they write online reviews for native hosts, whereas hosts prefer to pay more efforts to foreign guests while making managerial responses. Our work not only sheds light on the user behavioral patterns for virtual tourism products but also provides multiple practical implications for the platforms, businesses, and guests in the sharing economy.