We have analyzed the user reviewing practices on Grip com major online travel agency in China, and tound that the valence of reviews had a significant impact on the online sales of traveler hotel room online reviewi may serve to reduce the cosnitive load of potential travelers, and thus increase their awareness. resulting In more sales. Our regression estimates sumest that, generally, a 10 percent increase in the ratings of user reviews can boost the dependent variable, index of online hotel bookinga, by more than five percent. The results also indicate that the variance in the valence rating scores across reviews does not sign 8cantly ence the number of online bookingi. In terms of other infuental factors for online sales, as the control variable in the research mod we find that room rate has a significantly negative eflect on the average number of online bookings, and that hotels in larger cities tend to receive more onine bookings. This study contributes to the tourism literature by revealing the influence of online consumer-generated reviews on online sales of hotel rooms at the firm lesel. The results suggest that online user reviews have a significant impact on online hotel bookings and confirm the importance ofonline ward of mouth for tounsm firm performance, as has been found in other industries online retailing (Chevtier & Mayzin. 2006) and movie industry (Duan al. 2003) Hotel managers should therefore seriously consider the online reviews of ther hotels that are posted on the websites travel agents. Another contribution of this study tr the validation of the new proxy to identify the number of online bookings made through travel agent websites, which could facilitate future studies There are some limitations in this study. These limitations relate to both methodology and data, which deserve more future research effort. For instance,to introduce the proxy for hotelonline sales, assume that customen have a constant probability of posting a renew on a travel agent website. Though the validity ofthis proxy was supported by empirical data, this assumption still too strit from a theoretical perspective Future studies can be carried out to investigate the posibility of loosing this assumption and re-test the valiai y the proy As well although this study shows that generated reviews have a significant impact on business performance, we cannot sure whether all reviews have the same the or reviews are not considered either It would thus be useful to analyne the different innuence or
perceived usefulness of different reviews. Furthermore, the effect of che content of reviews on the performance of hotels merits investi- gation using web-mining technologies to further understand the impacts of online reviews. Findings ofthis study were based on the data collected from a website in China. Therefore. the research fi ings may not be generalized. Still, this sumgestsdirectionsforfurther research Finally, the cross sectional analysis did not reveal time vat e characteristic, a panel data analysis in the future would be beneficial to gain more insight into this