Congruence in Communication and Customer Booking Decision: A Cognitive Heuristic Perspective

This study adopts a cognitive heuristic perspective to examine the role of congruence in communication in influencing customer decision-making in the Airbnb context. It is well accepted that home-feeling is an important guest experience of Airbnb. We particularly examine how potential guests source credible online home-feeling-oriented information to make booking decisions. Existing research on home-feeling and its positive impact focus on a single source of information, either from the host or the guest while overlooking the (in)congruence of information of these sources. The results of polynomial regressions on 2,644 matching data from Airbnb support our view. Our findings show that booking will be higher when guest reviews and host self-descriptions are aligned with a high-level congruence of home-feeling-oriented information. However, when they are not closely aligned, a better outcome of booking is achieved based on a high level of home-feeling-oriented information from guest review than that from host self-descriptions.