A Bibliometric Investigation of Electronic Word-of-Mouth in Tourism and Hospitality Research

Introduction

Internet-based technologies and platforms have had a significant influence on marketing. Using digital platforms, organizations can engage customers directly and receive quick feedback through likes, clicks, and comments. On online portals such as e-commerce websites, social media platforms, weblogs, and peer-to-peer networking sites, users can voice their opinions regarding acquired items and services. The customer’s feedback and opinion about a product or service are called as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM; Donthu et al., 2021). eWOM can be represented in many different forms, such as likes, comments, ratings, reviews, video testimonials, and tweets (Nam et al., 2020). eWOM is regarded as more reliable and convincing than traditional media, given that consumers are exposed to many advertising stimuli daily. Customers increasingly rely on online reviews day by day, a form of eWOM, before making their final purchasing decisions (Cheung & Thadani, 2012).

The importance of eWOM on consumer behavior has also been established in the context of tourism and hospitality services (Litvin et al., 2008; Sparks & Browning, 2011; Vermeulen & Seegers, 2009). Customers are making booking or purchase selections largely after reading reviews on famous sites like TripAdvisor, Twitter, and Google (Donthu, Kumar, Pandey, et al., 2021). One of the main reasons for this is the risk aversion effort by using the past experiences of others, as travel and accommodation services are high-risk purchasing decisions (Huang et al., 2010).

Numerous research (Jalilvand & Samiei, 2012; Ran et al., 2021; Sparks & Browning, 2011) have addressed the role of eWOM in the tourist and hospitality industries. Furthermore, retrospective analyses have also been carried out to delineate the boundaries and structure of the body of knowledge and illustrate its evolution (Chen & Law, 2016; Hlee et al., 2018; Litvin et al., 2018; Pourfakhimi et al., 2020; Sotiriadis, 2017). Retrospective literature analyses can be performed through systematic literature review, meta-analysis, and bibliometric analysis. However, a systematic literature review can handle few studies on a particular topic and lacks quantitative metrics, making it prone to researcher bias (Gölgeci et al., 2022). On the other hand, although meta-analysis is a powerful technique, it is limited to a certain field and is susceptible to publication bias (Donthu et al., 2021). In light of these challenges, tracing the growth of the existing literature requires a rise in bibliometric research that can evaluate a vast number of works and have analytical rigor (Gölgeci et al., 2022). Nonetheless, there is a paucity of investigations that examines the theoretical and conceptual structure of eWOM research in the tourism and hospitality fields (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2022). To bridge this gap, this chapter aims to examine the evolution of the eWOM literature in the field of tourism and hospitality and to increase understanding of its theoretical and conceptual structure. In doing so, it conducts bibliometric analysis using the R package Bibliometrix.