Purpose - It is a very important issue for the Korean tourism industry to increase tourism revenue by attracting foreign tourists. Although Japanese tourists have been an important part of the Korean tourism industry for a long time, the level of tourist satisfaction including accommodation has been at the worst compared to other foreign visitors, which strongly requires concrete solutions. Therefore, this study focuses on improving the satisfaction level of Japanese visitors in the use of accommodation, and find out the influence of the managerial response.
Research design, data, and methodology - In this study, customer review and managerial response of hotels in Seoul were collected from "Rakuten Travel" which is the most representative online travel agency in Japan. As a result of collecting data from 2016 to 2018, 6,190 customer reviews and 1,241 managerial responses from 120 hotels were used for analysis. In addition, information on the properties of 120 hotels, such as the number of rooms, classification, types of hotel facilities, types of room facilities, accessibility and prices, were collected. To test the hypotheses, moderated multiple regression analysis was conducted with SPSS 22.0.
Results - It was found that only 25 sites, 20.8% of the total 120 sites, were implementing managerial response and average response rate was 66.42% among them. As a result of examining the main effects of the hotel attributes on the ratings, accessibility and price are confirmed as effective variables. We also found that the response rate has a significant moderate effect in both the accessibility and price. In other words, there was a significant difference in the influence of accessibility and price on the ratings depending on the response rate. Also, it was confirmed that the response rate is not a pure moderator variable but a quasi moderator variable. Overall, the evidences partially supported the hypothesis.
Conclusion - It was possible to provide important suggestions to the hotel managers who were concerned about managing tourist satisfaction with accessibility problems. It was found that the accessibility problem could be overcome by increasing the response rate. It was also confirmed that high ratings can be more effectively achieved for high priced hotels by increasing the response rate.