Hotel reviews during the pandemic: Encouraging repeat customers to “speak up” through management response

After the outbreak of health crises, the number of new customers decreases sharply. As a relatively stable customer base, repeat customers and their feedback become particularly important for hotels. However, repeat customers tend to post wordless reviews (reviews without text). To solve this problem, we examine the effects of hotels’ long-term response strategies on repeat customers’ pandemic reviews using data scrapped from a travel platform. Results indicate that repeat customers tend to “speak up” and post reviews with text if the responses to their previous reviews are longer, frequent, and contain more assent words. Moreover, the positive effects of response rate and assent words are stronger when the pandemic is more severe. The abovementioned effects are mainly found in newly-opened hotels and large-sized hotels. Besides, these response strategies may stimulate more positive emotions in review-texts. Our findings could guide hotel managers in eliciting more valuable feedback from repeat customers.