Segmenting Reviewers Based on Reviewer and Review Characteristics

Abstract

Being experiential commodities, it becomes difficult to make any judgment about hotels or attractions before their utilization. This is where the reviews provided by guests/tourists play an influential role. Therefore, it becomes imperative to study in-depth characteristics of reviewers through which such valuable information is diffused, and also classifying them into various categories based on it. This study adopts a two-stage methodology to segment reviewers based on the reviewer as well as review characteristics. In the first stage, factors that help in evaluating a reviewer are formulated using factor analysis. Later on, cluster analysis is performed for the segmentation of reviewers. Finally, the obtained reviewers' segments are validated using external validation methods. The study comes up with various implications that could be profitable for business managers in selecting the reviewer community.