Research On The Influence Of Online Travel Platform Management Responses On Consumers’ Perceived Helpfulness

With the rise of O2 O online travel platforms,online reviews and management responses have become an important reference for consumers’ purchasing decisions.At present,the research on the influence of management responses on consumer behavior has become a hot research topic in academic circles.Online travel products are typical experience products.Studies have shown that for experience products,consumers pay more attention to neutral reviews rather than extreme reviews,and neutral reviews have a greater impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions than extreme reviews.Merchants replying to neutral reviews in a certain way can not only reduce the negative impact of negative information contained in reviews on merchants’ services or product image,but also provide consumers with richer useful information for purchasing decisions.Therefore,it is particularly critical and necessary to study the impact of online travel platform management responses on consumers’ perceived helpfulness under the background of neutral reviews.In order to study how merchants should respond to neutral reviews efficiently in order to trigger higher consumers’ perception of helpfulness,this article selects the Ctrip travel platform as the research background.This paper study the impact of management responses on consumers’ perceived helpfulness from three aspects: management response characteristics,management response strategies and related moderator variables.This article adopts a quantitative research method.First,this paper uses a web crawler to capture data such as neutral comments and corresponding management responses on the product pages of Ctrip.com.Second,we use the text sentiment classification method based on the bag of words model to further divide the neutral reviews into: completely neutral reviews and mixed neutral reviews,and use the naive Bayesian text classification method based on machine learning to divide the management response strategies into an apology explanation response strategy and a nonapology explanation response strategy.Finally,this article constructs a mathematical model and uses the method of Tobit regression to process and analyze the acquired data.Research shows that:(1)For neutral reviews,the existence of management responses,the length of management responses,and the timeliness of management responses positively affect consumers’ perceived helpfulness,while the product star plays a negative moderating role in it.(2)In response to neutral reviews,the apology explanation response strategy can improve the helpfulness of consumers’ perception of information.(3)The length of neutral reviews and the type of neutral reviews play a moderating role in the impact of the apology explanation responses on consumers’ perceived helpfulness.Neutral review length negatively moderates the positive effect of the apology explanation response strategy on consumers’ perceived helpfulness.Compared with completely neutral reviews,adopting an apology explanation response strategy for mixed neutral reviews can improve consumers’ perceived helpfulness more effectively.Finally,according to the research results,this paper proposes corresponding management suggestions for merchants from the perspectives of management response characteristics,management response strategies and correlated moderating variables.This paper aims to guide online travel platform merchants to respond to consumers’ online reviews more efficiently,so as to enhance consumers’ perceived helpfulness and improve business performance.