ABSTRACT

The motivation to post an evaluation on a travel blog stems from a common enjoyment in sharing valuable information and is typically tied to the writer's confidence. Today consumers generally accept eWOM as more credible than marketer communication. Now when a person seeks advice or information, it goes beyond family, friends, and face-to-face contacts and extends to the web where it includes eWOM too. Today all the leading travel blogs place restrictions on how their website's contents can be used. Researchers would be wise to carefully review each travel blog's terms and restrictions before extracting their data for research purposes. Virtually all the managers and executives we come into contact with, both love and loathe travel blogs. Though managed travel blogs take precautions to limit deception, deceptive postings are possible and have been identified as far from rare in interpersonal communications to online dating services.