Exploring the Online Hotel Reviews on Travelers’ Green Psychological Cognition

Green hotels prioritize safety, health, and environmental sustainability, promoting eco-conscious practices in operations. As for green hotel operators, affecting travelers’ cognitive reactions to environmentally friendly practices and, ultimately, their booking intentions is important, especially since the impact of online hotel reviews on consumer behavior is significant. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to establish a measurement of online hotel reviews corresponding to source credibility and review characteristics for green hotels as well as to explore how green online hotel reviews relate to travelers’ green psychological cognition and influence their green hotel booking intentions based on a cognitive model and a knowledge-attitude-behavior model. The study design is a two-phase quantitative survey in the Penghu area, Taiwan, and investigates online hotel reviews with green issues that consider the perspectives of source attributes and content characteristics. This study distributed questionnaires for the first and second phases, which yielded 350 and 568 responses, respectively. A structural equation model (SEM) is used to examine the hypothesized relationships between source credibility, review characteristics, conformity, green perceived value and online green hotel booking intention. The results revealed that the source credibility and review characteristics represent valuable information to persuade travelers about choosing green hotels. Both conformity and green perceived value play important roles as mediators. This study also extends the current knowledge on the cognitive model and the knowledge-attitude-behavior model. A new path vision thus emerges to fill existing gaps in the literature.