Are you a hotel manager?

To stay ahead of the game, you need to know your guests’ preferences before they arrive at your hotel

Dr Roya Rahimi

Reader in Marketing and Leisure Management

Studies of consumer behaviour and customer experience are vital elements of the post-purchase period in hotels and assisting managers in understanding the reasons for hotel guest satisfaction. They help hotels understand their future customers’ needs better and adjust their services. The social web heavily affects the hotel industry and provide the travellers with the opportunity to easily share their experiences online. Using Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and online travel agencies travellers can publicly comment about their experiences. Online reviews provide an irreplaceable opportunity for hotel businesses to understand their customers’ views and expectations and make better strategic and tactical decisions to create value.

In a recent research, Dr Roya Rahimi and her colleagues applied a combined sentiment and text analysis to 329,849 UK hotel reviews from UK TripAdvisor to evaluate the types of attributes and services that are used most frequently in guests’ reviews on TripAdvisor with five-star ratings as well as those that are less desirable with one-star ratings including those with gender differences. The findings reveal important differences between the male- and female-produced terms.

The results show that female travellers pay more attention to the hotel’s core products and their comfort compared to male travellers. External factors and hotel attributes play critical roles in high rating reviews. These include hotel attributes such as the garden, atmosphere, or staff helpfulness. 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. Looking at the terms, females are more likely to use warm, positive sentiment terms such as Lovely, Beautiful, Amazing, Fab, Loved, Gorgeous, Fabulous, Wonderful, Beautifully, Absolutely, Brilliant, Perfect, and Fantastic to express their experiences. In contrast, males use more technical or weaker positive language such as Excellent, Good, Superb, Decent, Reasonable, Pleasant, Superbly, Terrific, and Certainly. The negative sentiments of Disappointment and Disgusted are more used by females while males use terms such as Poor and Nonsense.

To access the full paper in the University of Wolverhampton Repository, follow the below link on WIRE: https://wlv.openrepository.com/handle/2436/624555