The antecedents of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward various types of hotels: A text mining approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2016.03.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Customers’ online reviews play an important role in generating electronic word of mouth; these reviews serve as an online communication tool that highly influences consumers’ demand for hotels. Using latent semantic analysis, which is a text mining approach, we analyze online customer reviews of hotels. We find that the determinants that create either customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction toward hotels are different and are specific to particular types of hotels, including full-service hotels, limited-service hotels, suite hotels with food and beverage, and suite hotels without food and beverage. Our study provides a clue for hoteliers to enhance customer satisfaction and alleviate customer dissatisfaction by improving service and satisfying the customers’ needs for the different types of hotels the hoteliers own.

Introduction

Online booking and reviewing are becoming more popular for customers with the rapid development of information technology. Customers often post reviews, recommendations, or opinions on websites after staying in a hotel. These reviews act as electronic word of mouth, which can be defined as all the informal communication directed at customers through Internet-based technology that is related to the usage or characteristics of special products and services or their providers (Litvin et al., 2008). Compared with traditional word of mouth, electronic word of mouth has a wider reach and creates faster interactions; therefore, it has a much greater effect on influencing demand (Cantallops and Salvi, 2014).

Positive reviews show customers’ satisfaction with their experience while negative reviews express dissatisfaction. These written reviews describe customers’ experience staying in the hotel and show their opinions toward the hotel and their corresponding staying experience. Written reviews are more informative, and therefore reflect customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction in a more detailed manner than customer ratings, which are usually the numbers evaluated by customers with the range from 1 to 10 toward some specific aspect of the hotel services or overall staying experience. Identifying the type and importance of factors that lead to customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction in written reviews is the first step for hoteliers utilizing electronic word of mouth to generate more demand and improve their financial performance (Sparks and Browning, 2011). However, research comparing the type of determinants that create customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction and ranking their importance in leading customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction is rare.

Another phenomenon that may need to be given more attention is that opening a certain type of hotel, such as a full-service hotel, limited-service hotel, suite hotel with food and beverage, or a suite hotel without food and beverage is an essential strategy that influences a hotel’s production, service operations, facilities, and target market segments (Kim et al., 2013b). Different types of hotels have different core products and services (Tanford et al., 2012). Customers rank the importance of each service dimension differently because they have varying perceptions, expectations, and preferences for each type of hotel. However, little research explores the moderating effect of hotel type on customers’ perception (Kim et al., 2013b).

The objective of this study is to find out and compare the determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward various types of hotels. Our comparisons are based on three perspectives. First, because the absence of some key aspects of hotel service causes customer dissatisfaction, they are necessary for satisfaction to occur but not sufficient in themselves to cause markedly higher levels of satisfaction (Gu and Ryan, 2008); therefore, we want to compare the determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction for each type of hotel. Hence, the first research question is the following: For each type of hotel, are the types of determinants that create customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction the same? Second, once the determinants are identified, we want to compare their importance in leading to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Therefore, the second research question is this: For each type of hotel, which determinant plays the most important role with regards to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction? Third, we want to compare both the type and the importance ranking of the determinants of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction toward various types of hotels. Therefore, the third research question is: Are the type and importance ranking of the factors that lead to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction toward various types of hotels the same?

The main contributions of our study lie in the fact that this is one of the first papers to identify and compare both the type and importance ranking of the determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction among hotel types. In our study, we will use latent semantic analysis (LSA), a text mining technique, to explore the determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward hotels. LSA provides a more objective approach for analysis of the contexts of reviews because of its mathematical characteristics.

The rest of our paper is organized as follows: Section Two reviews the related literature; Section Three develops the hypothesis; Section Four introduces our research method; Section Five analyzes the data and summarizes the results; Section Six engages in related discussions based on data analytics results; Section Seven discusses the theoretical and managerial implications; and Section Eight provides conclusions and future extensions.

Section snippets

Customer satisfaction toward hotels

Customer satisfaction can be defined as an evaluation based on a comparison between customers’ experiences and their initial expectations (Aurier and Evrard, 1998). The customer satisfaction index is one effective way to measure customer satisfaction in the hotel context (Deng et al., 2013). Customer satisfaction plays an important role in enhancing a hotel’s demand, which leads to improved financial performance (Sun and Kim, 2013) and higher efficiency (Assaf and Magnini, 2012).

Many key

Hypothesis development

According to the expectation-disconfirmation model, which describes individual cognitive processes, customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction are measured based on the comparison of their expectations with the actual perceptions of the service performed. When the services meet or exceed their expectations, customers are satisfied; otherwise, customers are dissatisfied (Oliver, 1980).

During the customer’s booking process, the absence of certain factors can generate dissatisfaction, but their

Data collection

The data for this study was collected from the third-party hotel booking website www.booking.com, which is the world’s largest third-party hotel booking website. Only travelers who have stayed in the hotels listed on www.booking.com can post reviews on the site. Therefore, the site’s reviews are more authentic. Travelers are asked to post their positive and negative reviews separately. The positive reviews indicate the customers’ satisfaction while the negative reviews indicate their

Factors leading to customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward each specific type of hotel

We present an LSA based on positive and negative reviews for customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward each hotel type in order to figure out the influential factors that determine positive reviews (customer satisfaction) and negative reviews (customer dissatisfaction) for specific types of hotels. Tables 1–4 exhibit the top factors identified in the LSA, each of which represents an aspect of positive and negative reviews. In each table, each factor’s significance is indicated by the

Different determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward hotels

Our results supported hypothesis 1. For each type of hotel, the determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction were different. Comparatively, the determinants of customer satisfaction, which include location and accessibility, staff performance, and room quality, were more general and related to core hotel services.

Table 5 shows that having a good location was the most influential determinant of customer satisfaction for all hotel types except suite hotels without food and beverage.

Theoretical implications

Customer Online reviews in the hospitality and tourism industry have recently received increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners (Schuckert et al., 2015). Our study is included in one of the five clusters of studies concerning online reviews in the hospitality and tourism industry identified by Schuckert et al. (2015) as opinion mining/sentiment analysis. The other four clusters are online reviews and online buying, satisfaction and management, motivation, and the role of

Conclusions

Through an LSA of online customer reviews toward hotels, our study identified and compared the determinants of satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward full-service hotels, limited-service hotels, suite hotels with food and beverage, and suite hotels without food and beverage. The following are our main conclusions.

Regarding our first research question, we found that for each type of hotel, the determinants of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction were different. Comparatively, the

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