ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the way that social media and more precisely hotel reviews assist to the transparency of hotel service. Recent evidence shows that online reviews are among the most important factors influencing online hotel bookings. Cost-based pricing, competition-driven pricing and customer-driven pricing are the three basic hotel pricing techniques. Online hotel reviews may unveil important product and price information, thus constituting product and price transparency easier. Market transparency has become a reality since there is much available and accessible information on hotel services and market prices, especially when using meta-search engines. Information transparency exists in the sense that Web 2.0 users can easily have available, accessible and sufficient information of all kinds, even from reviewers with similar needs in terms of hotel services. Web 2.0 has vastly facilitated transparency in terms of market, supplier, product, information and price.