A multi-perspective approach of international tourist satisfaction in tourism service: from big data perspective

Abstract

Purpose Customer reviews on online platforms after their service experience not only provide useful information to help other customers make reasonable decisions about the hotel, but also provide a great opportunity for scholars to refresh the research directions on customer experience and satisfaction in tourism services. This paper aims to discover the key driver of international tourist satisfaction in the hospitality service and the way to effectively improve this factor, starting with the abundant online customer reviews. Design/methodology/approach A multi-perspective approach was used to compare the differences in service providers and service user’s interpretation of the factors that shape customer satisfaction. In addition to content analysis of nearly 2,500 online reviews of international tourists for 21 high-class hotels in Vietnam on Booking.com in 2019, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with the managers of 5-star hotels to show a comprehensive picture of customer satisfaction drivers, especially the staff factor. Findings The research results have clarified the main aspects of the staff – the most important service factor among the seven hotel service factors investigated from the customer’s perspective. On the other hand, the study also emphasized the gap between customers’ perception of the staff and the enterprise’s efforts and implementation of this factor. These findings allowed to identify aspects of staff that could be further improved to more effectively satisfy customers and provide a superior experience. Research limitations/implications The study suggested a potential research direction using a multi-perspective approach to better understand trends and shifts in customer experience and satisfaction. Further studies could overcome the limitation of the research scope of this paper by examining different destinations or expanding the exploration of both mid-range and budget hotels. Practical implications The findings offer implications for managers to improve tourist satisfaction by developing organizational culture and mindfulness-related training programs for employees. Originality/value This study has enriched the literature of tourism and hospitality services by providing empirical evidence on the exploitation of big data sources and deepening the insights into international tourist satisfaction with hotel services.

An empirical study on the imbalance phenomenon of data from recommendation questionnaires in the tourism sector

“…Hotels attributes are key to customer positive experience as they directly affect customer satisfaction and consequently influence loyalty (Gallarza et al, 2016;Baniya and Thapa, 2017;Bergel et al, 2019;Kunja et al, 2021;Luong et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2022) and future intentions to purchase (Akinci and Aksoy, 2019;Bergel et al, 2019). After the current situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, technology innovation is likely to play a key role in the hotel industry recovery, primarily focussing on guest interaction with employee's reduction and enhanced cleaning (Heinonen and Strandvik, 2020;Shin and Kang, 2020).…”

“…The relationship between satisfaction and recommendation has been extensively studied in the specialized tourism sector literature (Bowen and Chen, 2001;Kandampully and Suhartanto, 2000;Oh, 1999;Raza et al, 2012;Oklevik et al, 2018;Sukhu et al, 2019;Luong et al, 2020;Serra-Cantallops et al, 2018). Most research focuses on how satisfaction affects recommendation (Serra-Cantallops et al, 2018;Luong et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2022) rather than focussing on the importance of imbalanced data assessment in the hotel recommendation models and its impact on the decision-making process.…”