Do expectations towards Thai hospitality differ? The views of English vs Chinese speaking travelers

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to shed light on differences in the patterns of online rating behavior that Chinese- and English-speaking travelers adopt when making hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. Design/methodology/approach A dual analysis was conducted on 800 online reviews for eight hotel brands. The brands, which are currently operating in Bangkok City, are considered to be representative of their categories. The hotels were selected based on their abilities to meet the quantitative and qualitative requirements of the text mining strategy adopted in this study. Findings The results reveal that, with respect to all of the hotel service attributes (i.e. Service, Cleanliness, Room, Sleep Quality, Location, Value and Overall), the ratings offered by the English-speaking guests were higher than the Chinese-speaking travelers. Based on the qualitative analysis, the ten service attributes which had the most impact on traveler satisfaction were distinguished. These attributes were then classified into three broadly themed categories including intangible service, tangible service and staying experience. The results from the word frequency analysis also helps to clarify which features are drawing attention from travelers from different backgrounds. Originality/value This study contributes to tourism and hospitality literature by confirming certain differences in the online rating behavior of Chinese- and English-speaking hotel guests.

Exploring the attributes of hotel service quality in Florianópolis-SC, Brazil: An analysis of tripAdvisor reviews

“…The attribute "room" was presented in most of the studies analyzed during article reviews, as shown in Table 1. Many of these studies identified this attribute as a positive comment generator (Alrawadieh & Law, 2019;Lee et al, 2020;Sann & Lai, 2020a), and linked it to customer satisfaction (Herjanto et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2017;Padma & Ahn, 2020;Wu et al, 2017). On the other hand, there were also studies that corroborated the results of this research, by observing the attribute "room" as a negative comment generator (Hu et al, 2019;Köseoglu et al, 2019).…”

“…Research that used UGC of hotels in China revealed that Chinese guests expect personalized service, while North American guests prefer standardized service (Ying et al, 2020); the behavior of guests of different nationalities toward quality attributes of hotels in the United Kingdom is influenced by cultural context (Sann & Lai, 2020b); in hotels in the United Kingdom, Asian guests encounter more service failures with respect to the engineering aspect of operations (room equipment issues), while non-Asian guests encountered more service failures in housekeeping (toilets, public areas, cleaning, and bedding) (Sann & Lai, 2020a).…”

“…Several studies, as identified in Table 1, use the Likert scale (ranging from 1: terrible to 5: excellent) defined on the platforms to determine a negative (dissatisfaction) or positive (satisfaction) review from the guest regarding the quality attributes of the service platforms (Lee et al, 2020;Sann & Lai, 2020a;Ying et al, 2020).…”

“…However, previous studies have not established a consensus regarding the relevance level of quality attributes about hotels. Studies have identified distinct sets of attributes that vary in relation to the level of relevance given by customers, and according to the environment and profile of the traveler (Sann & Lai, 2020a, 2020bSun et al, 2017;Ying et al, 2020).…”

“…Most of the previous studies also seek to determine the polarity of the feelings expressed in the reviews using the score scales suggested by the platforms (Lee et al, 2020;Sann & Lai, 2020a;Ying et al, 2020), where low scores are identified as negative reviews and high scores are identified as positive reviews. Nevertheless, a reviewer may express positive and negative feelings regarding different quality attributes in the same sentence (B.…”