The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Food Quality in UGC

User-generated content diffusion on social networks has triggered an explosive attention in various disciplines. Within tourism activities, social media has growth in the past years rapidly through regular social network sites, or thematic social network sites such as TripAdvisor. The present study aims to provide a deeper insight into this matter, having as starting point the thought that clients posts good or bad reviews, regarding to different aspects of their experience; and, that a client who has a good experience in restaurant tends to revisit it and recommended it to friends, as opposite if the experience was bad they tell this to friend and recommend not visit. To assess customers’ reviews of restaurants, data was gathered on TripAdvisor of Top 10 restaurants in two island context Azores and Hawaii. All the comments were studied carefully and categorized in set of dimensions that measured how the entirety of a meal was perceived: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. As the results showed, food is the most decisive variable adopted in the UGC. Additionally, our findings support the notion that the overall quality of the meal reflects a lot more than flavor or taste of the food. To these elements, we need to add visual effect, freshness of the ingredients, and healthiness of the meal, among others as main contents spread on SNS. Thus, results reinforce the literature relative to the social media and ads to the knowledge of the contents created and shared by tourists relative to restaurant experience as a whole.