What do hotel customers complain about? Text analysis using structural topic model
Publication Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
6-2019
Abstract
The ability to understand the causes of customers' complaints is critical for hotels to improve their service quality, customer satisfaction, and revenue. This study adopts a novel structural topic model text analysis method to analyze 27,864 hotel reviews in New York City, and show that it leads to improved inference on consumer dissatisfaction. Our results reveal 10 topics, whose appearances in the negative reviews are substantially higher than those in the positive reviews. In addition, we investigate how customer complaints vary across different hotel grades. Results indicate that customer complaints for high-end hotels are mainly related to service issues, whereas customers of low-end hotels are frequently annoyed by facility-related problems. This research contributes to the hospitality literature by enhancing our understanding of the aspects of hotel customers' dissatisfaction through rigorous statistical analysis, their correlations, and importance for different hotel grades.
Keywords
Online hotel reviews;Customer dissatisfaction;Structural topic model;Text mining;Tripadvisor
Discipline
Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Tourism and Travel
Research Areas
Information Systems and Management
Publication
Tourism Management
Volume
72
First Page
417
Last Page
426
ISSN
0261-5177
Identifier
10.1016/j.tourman.2019.01.002
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
HU, Nan; ZHANG, Ting; GAO, Baojun; and BOSE, Indranil.
What do hotel customers complain about? Text analysis using structural topic model. (2019). Tourism Management. 72, 417-426.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8045
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2019.01.002