A Comparative Analysis of Content in Traditional Survey versus Hotel Review Websites

Increasingly customers publish their opinions or observations regarding tourism products on the internet. Review websites allow customers to express their opinion regarding the service offered during their stay by awarding points to pre-selected criteria or by publishing their comments. This feedback can provide valuable information to service providers. Whether these alternative sources of marketing research fulfil the quality criteria of classical marketing research has not yet been fully explored. In this contribution, the question asked is whether there are significant differences between the results provided by traditional marketing surveys and those provided by more alternative surveys using the web. The explorative analysis of the Swiss tourism destination Saas-Fee shows that the customers’ appraisals of the offers does not differ fundamentally between classical marketing research and the evaluations on review websites. However, anonymous forms of assessment on customer evaluation portals or online questionnaires seem to lead to more critical results compared to classical face-to-face marketing research.