Effects of the Booking.com rating system: Bringing hotel class into the picture

The purpose of this study is to continue the discussion initiated by Mellinas et al. (2015, 2016) on the effects of the Booking.com rating system and more widely on the use of the OTA as a data source in academic tourism and hospitality research. We enrich and complement the original work by Mellinas et al. (2015) by empirically investigating the effects of the Booking.com rating system on the distribution of hotel ratings for the overall population of hotels located in London over two years. Based on more than 1.2 million online reviews, we show that the overall distribution of hotel scores is significantly left skewed. Moreover, we find that the degree of skewness is positively associated with hotel class: lower-class hotels exhibit distributions of ratings that are statistically less skewed than higher-class hotels. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.