When analyzing user-generated content, such as online reviews and ratings, an emerging body of literature concerns the effect of offline content, finding evidence that environmental, weather conditions, and other situational factors affect both review engagement and rating performance. An unexplored topic is related to the role of expectations, and this paper investigates the effect of weather expectations on hotel online ratings. Conditional to the time of traveling (seasonality), a tourist might form a belief about the type of activities to carry out when on holiday or decide whether to travel depending on the weather forecasts. On these premises, a surprise (e.g., unexpected sunshine or unexpected rain) could impact the overall value of the experience and be captured by hotels’ ratings.

To this end, we analyze more than 200,000 online reviews for hotels listed on Booking.com in two popular Italian tourism destinations differing for their tourism mix (Milan and Venice) between September 2019 and February 2020. Preliminary findings confirm the existence of a statistically significant effect of weather surprise on online reviews, with good news positively affecting the final score and negative ones driving down satisfaction with hotel services. Results are robust to several specifications and, differently from most of the existent literature on online reputation, we control for room fares, hence considering the important role of value for money when judging services.

Join work with Laura Vici and Veronica Leoni