e-WOM and accommodation: An analysis of the factors that influence travelers’ adoption of information from online reviews

Online reviews (ORs) are continuing to foster a renewed spread of word-of-mouth in the travel industry. Travelers are increasingly using ORs to inform them about accommodations and other tourism-related products. As such, it is important to improve our understanding of the behavioral consequences of e-word-of-mouth. In this article, we adopt the elaboration likelihood model to identify what influences travelers to adopt information from ORs in their decision making. We measure the influence of six dimensions of information quality that are part of the central route and two dimensions that are associated with the peripheral route of persuasion. The results of this study reveal that product ranking, information accuracy, information value-added, information relevance, and information timeliness are strong predictors of travelers’ adoption of information from ORs on accommodations. These results imply that high-involvement travelers adopt both central (information quality) and peripheral (product ranking) routes when they process information from ORs.