Unpacking the Gendered Impact of Scarcity Cues and Customer Ratings on Online Hotel Bookings and Recommendations

To drive conversions, e-commerce and m-commerce platforms often employ various scarcity cues within their booking interfaces. These fall into two categories: limited-quantity (e.g., "Last room available!") and limited-time (e.g., "Offer ends in 3 hours!"). The utility of such cues extends to hotels, regardless of their overall customer ratings. Meanwhile, although gender serves as one of the primary factors for market segmentation, the differential reactions of men and women to various marketing cues within the online marketplace have not been thoroughly investigated. Hence, this paper investigates how gender influences consumers’ booking and recommendation intentions in response to scarcity cues for hotels with varying customer ratings. An online experiment (N = 385, 181 men and 204 women) was conducted. It manipulated scarcity cue type (limited-quantity and limited-time) and customer ratings (high and low) as between-participants factors. Booking intention was generally higher among men. This was particularly true under conditions of limited-quantity scarcity and high customer ratings. Moreover, men exhibited a higher intention to recommend compared with women when facing limited-quantity scarcity. The findings deepen the scholarly understanding of the gendered impact of scarcity cues and customer ratings on online hotel bookings and recommendations.