A Study Of Factors That Affect Attitudes Towards Restaurant Review Mobile Applications And Restaurants' Visiting Intention

Restaurants in Thailand,especially in the capital city of Bangkok,offer all type of cuisines around the world,from street eateries to fine dining,with all price ranges and are open with all times.Meanwhile,in China,the growth of the restaurants has been increasing gradually during the past four years,especially in Shanghai,from having a large number of international cuisines available along with the growth and expansion of the traditional ones.The emerging phenomenon of restaurants in both countries has encouraged the consumers to eat-out or dining-out more often and for almost every day.As they start to go dining out more and more,the number of restaurants keep increasing.With more options of restaurants to choose along with attractive price deals and promotions,more information is needed to guarantee that they will get the best quality of the service and will experience the best food with reasonable prices.In present day technology,consumers can share their opinions,critics and even recommendations of products or services they have experienced with each other through online or internet communication channels,such as websites or blogs,social media,such as Facebook and Instagram,and mobile applications.Mobile application is now being embraced,developed and improved progressively as most consumers are now owning smartphones and spending most of their times on it for internet access.The contents that are posted online,through either websites and blogs or through mobile applications can easily and potentially go viral.Consumers now using online sources to create word-of-mouth among them,while the marketers called it buzz marketing.Word-of-mouth is a powerful source of marketing to generate reputations and revenue for businesses,especially for businesses that provide services,such as restaurants,hair salon,spa,car wash etc.Therefore,it is crucial for businesses,especially restaurants,to keep up their good reputations by providing good services,good quality of food and reasonable prices in order to create a positive word-of-mouth or positive comments through online sources.Restaurant reviews have played an important role for both Thai and Chinese consumers as they are somewhat reliable sources of information,comments,critics and recommendation to search for before they decide to go visit that restaurants.Thai and Chinese consumers,especially female consumers,tend to have similar norms and values as they rather believe in reviews that are written by another consumers or even believe in their friends or families' recommendations than believing the advertisement from the marketers or advertisement directly from the restaurants.Purpose-Over the past few years,a great amount of researches have been done to examine the motivation or influences of consumers' intentions to go dining in particular restaurants,however,the study on the factors that could affect attitudes towards reading restaurant reviews through mobile applications and could,as a result,affect consumers' restaurants visiting intentions,especially the attitudes and intentions of Thai and Chinese female consumers as a comparative analysis,is less mentioned.Therefore,the researcher aims to examine and investigate the factors that could affect Thai and Chinese female consumers' attitudes towards restaurant reviews mobile application that can eventually affect their restaurants' visiting intention.Those factors are Source Credibility,Reviewers Reputation,Content,Consumers' Self Experience and Demographic factors,which are age,education,occupation and income.Source and Methodology-The researcher conducts a quantitative research approach by distributing questionnaire to 100 Thai female respondents and 100 Chinese female respondents in order to test the constructive model and assumptions.The researcher obtains Descriptive Analysis directed by SPSS software to examine the relationship between attitudes toward restaurant review and restaurant's visiting intention.Moreover,The Cronbach's alpha coefficients are also being focused on as it can indicate a high level of reliability of the data used in this research.The Regression analysis is also used to measure the relationship between the factors that affect attitudes toward restaurant review mobile applications of Thai and Chinese female consumers,which are source credibility,reviewers,content and consumer's self experience,and their restaurant's visiting intentions,as well as to test the hypotheses.During Regression Analysis four hypotheses were being test to determine the significant factors that affect the restaurant's visiting intentions among Thai and Chinese female consumers.Findings-The study demonstrates that,for Thai female consumers,only Hypothesis 4 or Consumers' Self Experience factor is the only factor that significantly affects the attitudes towards reading restaurant reviews through mobile applications among Thai female consumers,while for Chinese female consumers,only Hypothesis 3 or Content of the review is also the only factor that significantly affects the attitudes towards reading restaurant reviews through mobile applications among Chinese female consumers.However,the result unexpectedly shows that Source Credibility and Reviewers Reputation factors do not significantly affect consumers' attitudes toward restaurant review mobile applications and their restaurant's visiting intentions due to the invalid number of the results from applying Regression Analysis.Furthermore,the researcher also obtained Cross-tabulation Chi-Square as well in order to test the “demographic factors” hypothesis,or hypothesis 5.By looking at the Pearson Chi-Square's confidence level or p-value,the result shows that all of the demographic factors and consumers' restaurant's visiting intentions are proved to be dependent with each other while using the attitude factors;Source Credibility,Reviewers Reputation,Content and Consumers' Self Experience to determine the intention.Contribution-From the findings of this research,Thai and Chinese mobile applications developers can provide a further development to each country's restaurants reviews mobile applications to ensure the consumers that they will receive useful and effective information retrieved from the mobile applications.And most importantly,it is also essential for Thai and Chinese food and restaurants industry to focus on providing positive word-of-mouth from having a good and consistent service quality,as well as focusing on improving a good and positive image and dining experiences to the consumers.