Tourist satisfaction and review helpfulness: Examining the primary effects, mediating mechanisms, and moderating influences

Determining the key factors that enhance the perceived review helpfulness is critical within tourism industry, considering the intrinsically experiential character of tourism service. However, satisfaction, a crucial variable in behavioral research, influences the perceived review helpfulness, either positively or negatively. To elucidate the nuanced relationship and underlying mechanism between tourists’ satisfaction and perceived review helpfulness, this study leverages 1,867,672 TripAdvisor reviews spanning from 2004 to 2023. This study, grounded in dual-process theory, identifies a robust negative correlation between tourist satisfaction and perceived review helpfulness, thereby confirming an undesirably inverse relationship. It further uncovers the underlying mechanisms by elucidating the opposing mediating roles of affective and cognitive expression, which sequentially influence review informativeness through serial mediation. Additionally, the study underscores the moderating effect of analytic thinking. These findings advance our comprehensive understanding of the relationship between tourist satisfaction and perceived review helpfulness, and offer practical implications for platform and hotel managers.