MEASURING ONLINE REVIEWS: A METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK IN THE EUROPEAN CAMPING SECTOR
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18623/rvd.v23.5083Keywords:
Outdoor Hospitality, Online Reputation, Camping, Online ReviewsAbstract
The rapid expansion of digital review platforms has fundamentally transformed how service quality is evaluated in tourism and hospitality as well as in camping sector. Despite their growing importance, most empirical studies rely on ratings from a single platform, overlooking the fragmented nature of online reputation across digital environments. This study aims to develop and empirically test a methodological framework for measuring online reputation through the aggregation of ratings from multiple platforms in the European camping sector. The analysis is based on a sample of 200 high-quality campsites holding the Superplatz designation (ADAC, 2026), for which user ratings were collected from PinCamp, TripAdvisor, and Camping.info. To ensure comparability, platform-specific ratings were harmonized to a common scale and combined using both unweighted and review-count-weighted composite indices. Correlation analysis indicates moderate convergence across platforms, while robustness testing demonstrates high stability of rankings between aggregation methods (Spearman ρ ≈ 0.80). The findings suggest that online reputation should be understood as a distributed construct shaped by multiple digital ecosystems rather than as a platform-specific metric. The proposed framework provides a transparent and replicable approach for more reliable evaluation of service quality in increasingly platform-mediated tourism markets.
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