Abstract
Product reviews or user opinions represent a peculiar information source that can be exploited in supporting travel decision making. Product reviews provide other user’s experiences and, when consulted during a decision making process, tend to increase the user’s confidence in the decision by providing a feeling of greater objectivity in the product description compared with commercial information. Notwithstanding their value, until now, product reviews have not been integrated in travel recommender systems, they have been used only in dedicated web sites. In this paper we present the results of a first step towards the introduction of product reviews in a travel recommender system, namely the outcome of a user behaviour survey. In this survey, we investigated the possible roles/functions of product reviews in the product selection decision process. In this paper we show that there is a significant difference in the role of reviews with respect to the product involved in the decision process (e.g. hotel vs. activity) and we demonstrate that advanced users, i.e., users who are familiar with online booking platforms and with consumer-opinion platforms, are more interested in consulting reviews that criticize the product and express a negative evaluation of it.