Authentic versus fictitious online reviews: A textual analysis across luxury, budget, and mid-range hotels

Abstract

Extant literature suggests that authentic and fictitious online reviews could be distinguished by leveraging on their textual characteristics. However, nuances in textual differences between authentic and fictitious reviews across different categories of hotels remain largely unknown. Therefore, this paper analyzes textual differences between authentic and fictitious reviews across three hotel categories, namely, luxury, budget, and mid-range. It leverages on four possible textual characteristics – comprehensibility, specificity, exaggeration, and negligence – that could offer clues to ascertain review authenticity. Using a dataset of 1800 reviews (900 authentic + 900 fictitious), the results suggest that differences between authentic and fictitious reviews are largely inconsistent across hotel categories. This generally points to the difficulties in ascertaining review authenticity, which in turn offer implications for both research and practice.