The Impact of Online Reviews in the Nigerian Hospitality Industry : A case study of hotel management responses to negative online reviews

In today’s digital marketplace, customers are connected to social media sites, blogs, and digital platforms like booking.com, TripAdvisor, Google Reviews where public evaluations of businesses are written and shared with a large audience. The hotel is one of the numerous hospitality businesses with traces of online reviews in digital platforms. An aspect about hotel with online reviews is that it serves as critical factor influencing traveler’s decision, especially potential customers. Nevertheless, negative online reviews are accessible, identifying service failures and staff shortcomings that can discourage potential customers. Therefore, this study examines hotel management responses to negative online reviews. Get insights on their perception of negative reviews in general, their service recovery strategies and outcome of management responses. Using a qualitative research approach, the study analyzed data gotten from 13 semi-structured interviews with hotel managers and senior managerial staffs. This study implores thematic analysis to identify key patterns in hotel management responses to negative online reviews. The results show that hotel managers consider negative reviews emotionally challenging due to their very public nature but also appreciate their usefulness in pointing out gaps and ways of improving service to satisfy customers and hotel reputation. Components of service recovery include prompt action, apology, compensation, and follow-up, turns out to be common in this research. It turns out that these components form some of the central tenets that make up Service Recovery Theory, particularly procedural, interactional, and outcome justice. Another implication from this study is that failing to respond to negative customer reviews negatively impacts customer satisfaction, as well as affect perceptions concerning hotel reputation.