Exploring the Impact of Social Media on Hotel Service Performance

Abstract

Online user-generated content in various social media websites, such as consumer experiences, user feedback, and product reviews, has increasingly become the primary information source for both consumers and businesses. In this study, we aim to look beyond the quantitative summary and unidimensional interpretation of online user reviews to provide a more comprehensive view of online user-generated content. Moreover, we would like to extend the current literature to the more customer-driven service industries, particularly the hotel industry. We obtain a unique and extensive dataset of online user reviews for hotels across various review sites and over long time periods. We use the sentiment analysis technique to decompose user reviews into different dimensions to measure hotel service quality and performance based on the SERVPERF model. Those dimensions are then incorporated into econometrics models to examine their effect in shaping users’ overall evaluation and content-generating behavior. The results suggest that different dimensions of user reviews have significantly different effects in forming user evaluation and driving content generation. This paper demonstrates the importance of using textual data to measure consumers’ relative preferences for service quality and evaluate service performance.

Hotel online reviews: different languages, different opinions

“…Hotel Online Reviews: Different Languages, Different Opinions 1 Introduction Price, location, hotel facilities, loyalty programs, and design are some of the factors that drive a customer to choose a hotel (Anderson 2012;Cantallops and Salvi 2014). As the widespread use of the Internet has promoted the growth of user-generated content on social media platforms, online reviews have become another important driver of customers' hotel booking decisions (Anderson 2012;Duan et al 2016;Cantallops and Salvi 2014;Ye et al 2009). According to Duan et al (2016), online reviews in the hospitality industry influence up to 50% of all hotel booking decisions and in turn influence hotels' business performance.…”

“…As the widespread use of the Internet has promoted the growth of user-generated content on social media platforms, online reviews have become another important driver of customers' hotel booking decisions (Anderson 2012;Duan et al 2016;Cantallops and Salvi 2014;Ye et al 2009). According to Duan et al (2016), online reviews in the hospitality industry influence up to 50% of all hotel booking decisions and in turn influence hotels' business performance. Anderson (2012) estimated that a one percentage point increase in a social reputation index can lead to a 0.54% increase in hotel occupancy and a 1.42% increase in hotel revenue per available room.…”

An investigation of social media data during a product recall scandal

“…And an increasing number of large organisations have integrated or are exploring the option of integrating social media into their business strategies to gain value in areas such as customer traffic, customer loyalty and retention, sales and revenues, customer satisfaction and brand awareness and reputation (Montalvo 2016;Trainor et al 2014;Herzig et al 2016). For instance, the hospitality chain Starwood Hotels and Resort has been actively using social media to seek feedback from guests, address customer concerns and complaints, give advice to potential customers and simply to keep in touch with customers (Duan et al 2015). A study conducted by Pearson and Wegener (2013) from Bain and Company, a renowned management consulting firm, discovered that large organisations significantly outperform their competitors if cutting-edge data analytics were adopted for Big Data usage.…”

Monitoring of user‐generated reviews via a sequential reverse joint sentiment‐topic model

“…5,6 In addition, managing these customer reviews has been proven as an efficient approach to evaluating various dimensions of service quality. [7][8][9] Statistical process control (SPC) is an efficient tool for monitoring various quality characteristics and has been widely used in many cases, including continuous and categorical processes. 10,11 With its extraordinary performance in process monitoring, SPC can be applied to online product reviews for quickly detecting the hidden evolution in customer opinions and monitoring the quality of products and relevant services in an after-sales stage.…”