Know your guests’ preferences before they arrive at your hotel: evidence from TripAdvisor

Abstract

Purpose Toward achieving a better guest experience, the current study aims to use the word frequency comparison technique to evaluate the types of attributes and services that are used most frequently in guests’ five- and one-star reviews on TripAdvisor. The working-paper also aims to investigate the differences between reviews written by men and women. Design/methodology/approach A combined sentiment and text analysis was applied to 329,849 UK hotel reviews from UK TripAdvisor to identify factors that influence customer satisfaction, including those with gender differences. Findings The present findings reveal important differences between the male- and female-produced terms. The results show that female travelers pay more attention to the hotel’s core products and their comfort compared to male travelers. In terms of food and beverage, men’s comments tended to focus on pubs, beer and certain types of food. In contrast, women’s comments were more likely to be related to healthy eating, such as homemade, vegan and vegetarian foods, as well as fruits and healthy breakfasts. Women also pay more attention to the soft skills of staff such as friendliness, helpfulness and welcoming messages. Practical implications While core attributes of a hotel stay remain crucial for all guests, disparities exist between the language men and women use to describe them. For core products, women pay more attention to the room’s cleanliness, comfort and features such as bed, pillow, blanket, towel, toiletries and decoration, whereas men pay more attention to the layout, size and type of room. Hotels may use gender as a segmentation variable and use these findings in their marketing campaigns. Originality/value This is one of the first studies offering insights into the differences between the male and female reactions to and preferences for hotel services at a national level. Following a novel method, this study has listed and ranked attributes and differentiated them based on gender.

Satisfaction dimensions influencing consumers’ behavioral intentions through structural topic modeling analysis of restaurant reviews

“…Research fields include the USA, European countries, Latin America and other regions. Research has previously considered a six-month time period from several cities in the USA (Li et al , 2020; Luo and Xu, 2021; Tian et al , 2021; Xu, 2021) and the UK (Mathayomchan and Taecharungroj, 2020; Rahimi et al , 2022). Some studies narrow their research down to only fine-dining restaurants (Cassar et al , 2020; Harba et al , 2021; Saydam et al , 2022; Tao and Kim, 2022), green restaurants (Park et al , 2021) or single chain restaurants (DiPietro and Levitt, 2019); a sample may be formed randomly from collected reviews (Oh and Kim, 2021) or filtering and only studying positive ones in depth (Ahmad and Guzmán, 2021).…”

“…We do not consider any methods based on survey analysis, like structural modeling, where eWOM may not be representative (Jeong and Jang, 2011). Some research study review sentiment (Hajek and Sahut, 2022; Kim et al , 2022; Mathayomchan and Taecharungroj, 2020; Tian et al , 2021), but this method could be misleading and uninformative, because of relying only on the sentiment of each word and not on the context of their usage (Rahimi et al , 2022; Tao and Kim, 2022; Vidal et al , 2015). The authors see case study and content analysis as an alternative for in-depth text analysis (Ng et al , 2021) or emotion labeling surveys (Oh and Kim, 2021), but they are both limited because they cannot cover the amount of existent data.…”

From text to insights: understanding museum consumer behavior through text mining TripAdvisor reviews

“…TripAdvisor has been chosen as a source of data for several reasons. It is a popular platform for online reviews among travelers (Filieri, Alguezaui, & McLeay, 2015); considered a reliable data source to study consumer experience (Han, 2021) and is widely used in research (Burkov et al, 2023; Mandić et al, 2020; Rahimi, Thelwall, Okumus, & Bilgihan, 2022). According to Statista, TripAdvisor is one of the most popular travel websites worldwide.…”

An analysis of apartment listings in best destinations on an OTA: Thailand versus Japan

“…Room and location are tangible hotel facilities that satisfy travelers (Sann and Lai, 2023). Room, food and beverage and facilities constitute the main themes related to customer comments on TripAdvisor (Rahimi et al , 2022). Hotel location, facilities, room/bedding cleanliness and security are features contributing to customers’ satisfaction (Cherapanukom et al , 2021; Nguyen and Ho, 2023).…”