How user-generated judgments of hotel attributes indicate guest satisfaction

Abstract

ABSTRACT User-generated content is a major source of information particularly in tourism industry where consumers seek unbiased and unregulated information. While making their hotel booking decisions, consumers refer to the previous guests’ experiences expressed in the hotel reviews across social media. Studies in the literature have focused on enhancing the understanding of what makes customers satisfied or dissatisfied. They have analyzed the text reviews and the patterns in the overall rating and ranking of the hotels given by hotel guests. While most emerging destinations have been studied in the literature, studies related to India, a fast-growing leisure destination are scant. The present study tries to understand the hotel attributes that contribute towards customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction using online reviews for all hotels of Andaman & Nicobar Islands in India. Among the eight attributes identified from the most frequently used words in the text reviews, the study finds that while the location has a significant probability of increasing the ratings of both high- and low-rated reviews, rooms seem to have the most significant impact on lowering the probability of high scores irrespective of positive or negative sentiment review. The study also finds that guests of luxury hotels rate the hotels significantly higher than the guests of midrange and budget hotels.