Handling Negative Online Messaging: Tourism Sector Responses

Negative online messages in social media present unfavorable information and creates negative publicity to corporations. Negative online messages may harm corporate reputation. There is a debate that the company must respond to those messages or put them aside. Our research objective was to investigate the impact of negative online messages on tourism companies and how companies can best counter this impact. The benefits of corporate and third-party responses to negative online messages were compared. An experimental research design was used with a control group on 206 Chinese respondents in Hong Kong for comparison. Immediate corporate clarification was found to be effective for reputation recovery. Comments from key opinion leaders and regulators had a similar effect to corporate clarification. A prompt response and consistent message was preferable in all cases to the no comment option, which is traditionally perceived as “safer.” We extend the Situational Crisis Communication Theory on response strategies in the social media context. Corporations in the tourism industry have to monitor social media posts and respond to them in a timely manner.