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Tourist information search behavior is one of the most important aspects of risk reduction in the travel decision-making process. Understanding tourists' behavior when searching for online information has been heavily weighted toward user-generated content (UGC), mainly employed deductive research approaches. This study examines the influence of both UGC and marketer-generated content (MGC) on tourists' choice of restaurant, using eye-tracking technology to measure customers' visual behavior combined with retrospective think-aloud interviews. Data was collected from 28 participants in a laboratory-based study. Video recordings of participants' eye movements during the task aided participant recall in follow-up interviews. This study offers insights into the integrated investigation of the influence of UGC and MGC on tourists' information search behavior. It validates and extends understanding of the roles of pictorial information, written information, and other factors, and newly clarifies the role of both positive and negative reviews in influencing restaurant selection from international tourists' perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding consumers' needs and wants has been a major source of success for hotel organizations. Notwithstanding, investigating the valence of online reviews and modeling hotel attributes and performance is still a rather novel approach. Using partial least squares path modeling, Swiss country-level data for online reviews from 68 online platforms, together with data from 442 hotels, we test 11 hypotheses. Our research model includes three distinctive areas of the hotel: physical aspects, quality of food and drink, and human aspects of service provision. RevPAR and occupancy are employed as performance metrics. We also test for mediation effects. Results indicate that hotel attributes, including the quality of rooms, Internet provision and building show the highest impact on hotel performance, and that positive comments have the highest impact on customer demand. This study contributes to theories of valence on hotel performance and presents salient implications for practitioners to enhance performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]