Does TripAdvisor Makes Hotels Better?

It seems reasonable to expect that the emergence of opinion sites such as TripAdvisor should result in significant behavior changes among service providers. They might be expected to improve their service because disgruntled customers have the facility to share their impressions with a wider audience. There are two aspects to this, service providers are motivated to improve their services in order to avoid negative comment that can reach a wide audience and they are informed about what should be changed in order to improve their service. We report on an analysis of reviews relating to the hotel sector in Ireland that demonstrates this “TripAdvisor effect”. We compare these results with an analysis on Las Vegas hotels over a similar time period, where the effect is absent, presumably because sensitivity to reputation on TripAdvisor is already well-established there.