MINING MEANING FROM ONLINE HOTEL REVIEWS: IDENTIFICATION OF DETERMINANTS OF (DIS-) SATISFACTION USING LATENT DIRICHLET ALLOCATION

Jelena Tepavčević; Denis A. Dubover; Gojko Nikolić

doi:10.2298/IJGI2303339T

Authors

Jelena Tepavčević University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Science, Department of Geography, Tourism and Hotel Management, Novi Sad
Denis A. Dubover Don State Technical University, Faculty of Media Communications and Multimedia Technologies, Department of Media Production, Rostov-on-Don
Gojko Nikolić University of Montenegro, Faculty of Philosophy, Institute for Geography, Nikšić

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2298/IJGI2303339T

Keywords:

user-generated content, online review, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, business travelers

Abstract

User-generated content (UGC) is increasing, so it is critical to clearly understand what customers think about the positive and negative aspects of specific goods. Such information is crucial for customers as well as for businesses. Online reviews are a powerful tool for a deep comprehension of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. This research intended to recognize the sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among business travelers in city hotels in Serbia. A total of 5,596 online reviews from 120 city hotels in Serbia were collected. Keyword-based visualization was used to display the most frequent words related to the experience during the hotel stay, reflecting the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of consumers. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was used for grouping positive and negative reviews into various topics. Results showed that business travelers' primary satisfaction sources are “Conference facilities”, “Atmosphere”, “Amenities”, “Accessibility”, and “Location”. On the other hand, the sources of dissatisfaction are “Dirtiness” and “Internet Connection”. Based on the obtained results, hotel managers can direct their activities to improve the spheres that have proven to be the sources of dissatisfaction for customers.

Article metrics

References

Aletras, N., & Stevenson, M. (2013). Evaluating Topic Coherence Using Distributional Semantics. In A. Kolle & K. Erk (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013) (pp. 13–22). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/W13-01

Ampountolas, A., & Legg, M. P. (2021). A segmented machine learning modeling approach of social media for predicting occupancy. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 33(6), 2001–2021. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-06-2020-0611

Annisa, R., & Surjandari, I. (2019). Opinion mining on Mandalika hotel reviews using latent dirichlet allocation. Procedia Computer Science, 161, 739–746. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.11.178

Arasli, H., Saydam, M. B., Gunay, T., & Jafari, K. (2023). Key attributes of Muslim-friendly hotels’ service quality: voices from booking.com. Journal of Islamic Marketing, 14(1), 106–127. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIMA-11-2020-0341

Ariffin, A. A. M., & Maghzi, A. (2012). A preliminary study on customer expectations of hotel hospitality: Influences of personal and hotel factors. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 31(1), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2011.04.012

Banerjee, S., & Chua, A. Y. K. (2016). In search of patterns among travellers' hotel ratings in TripAdvisor. Tourism Management, 53, 125–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2015.09.020

Berezina, K., Bilgihan, A., Cobanoglu, C., & Okumus, F. (2016). Understanding Satisfied and Dissatisfied Hotel Customers: Text Mining of Online Hotel Reviews. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 25(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2015.983631

Bernini, C., & Cracolici, M. F. (2015). Demographic change, tourism expenditure and life cycle behaviour. Tourism Management, 47, 191–205. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.09.016

Bhattacherjee, A. (2001). Understanding Information Systems Continuance: An Expectation-Confirmation Model. MIS Quarterly, 25(3), 351–370. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250921

Blei, D. M., & Lafferty, J. D. (2005). Correlated Topic models. In Y. Weiss, B. Schölkopf, & J. Platt (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Vol. 18, pp. 147–154). MIT Press. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2005/file/9e82757e9a1c12cb710ad680db11f6f1-Paper.pdf

Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022. https://www.jmlr.org/papers/v3/

Boo, S., & Kim, J. (2013). Comparison of Negative eWOM Intention: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism, 14(1), 24–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/1528008X.2013.749381

Bradić, M., Kosar, L., & Kalenjuk, B. (2013). Business Guests Satisfaction in the Hotel Industry: A Case Study of North American Hotel Chains. Turizam, 17(2), 60–70. https://doi.org/10.5937/Turizam1302060B

Bulchand‐Gidumal, J., Melián‐González, S., & López‐Valcárcel, B. G. (2011). Improving hotel ratings by offering free Wi‐Fi. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, 2(3), 235–245. https://doi.org/10.1108/17579881111173776

Chan, E. (2004). An analysis of the gap in the perception of hotel marketing managers and business travelers regarding information technology facilities in hotel guestrooms in Hong Kong. Tourism Review International, 7, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3727/154427204774809538

Chang, Y.-C., Ku, C.-H., & Chen, C. H. (2019). Social media analytics: Extracting and visualizing Hilton hotel ratings and reviews from TripAdvisor. International Journal of Information Management, 48, 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2017.11.001

Cheng, S., Lam, T., & Hsu, C. H. C. (2005). Testing the sufficiency of the theory of planned behavior: A case of customer dissatisfaction responses in restaurants. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 24(4), 475–492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2004.10.006

Choi, T. Y., & Chu, R. (2001). Determinants of hotel guests’ satisfaction and repeat patronage in the Hong Kong hotel industry. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 20(3), 277–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-4319(01)00006-8

Chong, A. Y. L., Khong, K. W., Ma, T., McCabe, S., & Wang, Y. (2018). Analyzing key influences of tourists’ acceptance of online reviews in travel decisions. Internet Research, 28(3), 564–586. https://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-05-2017-0212

Cobanoglu, C., Corbaci, K., Moreo, P. J., & Ekinci, Y. (2003). A Comparative Study of the Importance of Hotel Selection Components by Turkish Business Travelers. International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration, 4(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1300/J149v04n01_01

Dawson, M., & Titz, K. (2012). Problem-Based Learning as A Strategy to Teach Service Quality: An assessment of on-line reviews. Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education, 24(2-3), 67–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/10963758.2012.10696672

Denecke, K. (2008). Using sentiwordnet for multilingual sentiment analysis. In IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshop (pp. 507–512). IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDEW.2008.4498370

Dinçer, M. Z., & Alrawadieh, Z. (2017). Negative Word of Mouse in the Hotel Industry: A Content Analysis of Online Reviews on Luxury Hotels in Jordan. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 26(8), 785–804. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2017.1320258

Dolnicar, S. (2002). Business travellers’ hotel expectations and disappointments: A different perspective to hotel attribute importance investigation. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 7(1), 29–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/10941660208722107

Dubé, L., & Renaghan, L. M. (2000). Creating visible customer value: How customers view best-practice champions. Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 41(1), 62–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/001088040004100124

Fauzi, M. A. (2019). Word2Vec model for sentiment analysis of product reviews in Indonesian language. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 9(1), 525–530. https://doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v9i1.pp525-530

Gour, A., Aggarwal, S., & Erdem, M. (2021). Reading between the lines: analyzing online reviews by using a multi-method web-analytics approach. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 33(2), 490–512. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-07-2020-0760

Griffiths, T. L., & Steyvers, M. (2004). Finding scientific topics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101, 5228–5235. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0307752101

Gruen, T. W., Osmonbekov, T., & Czaplewski, A. J. (2006). eWOM: The impact of customer-to-customer online know-how exchange on customer value and loyalty. Journal of Business Research, 59(4), 449–456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.10.004

Gu, H., & Ryan, C. (2008). Chinese clientele at Chinese hotels—Preferences and satisfaction. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 27(3), 337–345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2007.10.005

Guo, Y., Barnes, S. J., & Jia, Q. (2017). Mining meaning from online ratings and reviews: Tourist satisfaction analysis using latent dirichlet allocation. Tourism Management, 59, 467–483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.09.009

Heung, V. C. S., Qu, H., & Chu, R. (2001). The relationship between vacation factors and socio-demographic and travelling characteristics: The case of Japanese leisure travellers. Tourism Management, 22(4), 259–269. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0261-5177(00)00057-1

Ho-Dac, N. N., Carson, S. J., & Moore, W. L. (2013). The Effects of Positive and Negative Online Customer Reviews: Do Brand Strength and Category Maturity Matter? Journal of Marketing, 77(6), 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.11.0011

Hu, N., Zhang, T., Gao, B., & Bose, I. (2019). What do hotel customers complain about? Text analysis using structural topic model. Tourism Management, 72, 417–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2019.01.002

Huang, J.-H., Huang, C.-T., & Wu, S. (1996). National character and response to unsatisfactory hotel service. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 15(3), 229–243. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-4319(96)00009-6

Jana, A., & Chandra, B. (2016). Mediating Role of Customer Satisfaction in the Mid-Market Hotels: An Empirical Analysis. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 9(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.17485/ijst/2016/v9i1/81973

Joppe, M., Martin, D. W., & Waalen, J. (2001). Toronto's Image As a Destination: A Comparative Importance-Satisfaction Analysis by Origin of Visitor. Journal of Travel Research, 39(3), 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/004728750103900302

Kim, W. G., & Park, S. A. (2017). Social media review rating versus traditional customer satisfaction: Which one has more incremental predictive power in explaining hotel performance? International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 29(2), 784–802. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2015-0627

Kuhzady, S., & Ghasemi, V. (2019). Factors Influencing Customers' Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction with Hotels: A Text-Mining Approach. Tourism Analysis, 24(1), 69–79. https://doi.org/10.3727/108354219X15458295631972

Lawrence, B., & Perrigot, R. (2015). Influence of Organizational Form and Customer Type on Online Customer Satisfaction Ratings. Journal of Small Business Management, 53, 58–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsbm.12184

Lee, J., Park, D.-H., & Han, I. (2008). The effect of negative online consumer reviews on product attitude: An information processing view. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 7(3), 341–352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2007.05.004

Lee, K.-W., Kim, H.-B., Kim, H.-S., & Lee, D.-S. (2010). The Determinants of Factors in FIT Guests' Perception of Hotel Location. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 17(1), 167–174. https://doi.org/10.1375/jhtm.17.1.167

Lee, T. Y., & Bradlow, E. T. (2007). Automatic Construction of Conjoint Attributes and Levels from Online Customer Reviews. University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School.

Levy, S. E., Duan, W., & Boo, S. (2013). An Analysis of One-Star Online Reviews and Responses in the Washington, DC, Lodging Market. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 54(1), 49–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1938965512464513

Li, G., Law, R., Vu, H. Q., Rong, J., & Zhao, X. R. (2015). Identifying emerging hotel preferences using emerging pattern mining technique. Tourism Management, 46, 311–321, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.06.015

Li, H., Ye, Q., & Law, R. (2013). Determinants of Customer Satisfaction in the Hotel Industry: An Application of Online Review Analysis. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 18(7), 784–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/10941665.2012.708351

Litke, V. (2015). Business tourism in Kaluga Region: Attraction of foreign customers to Hilton Garden (Bachelor’s thesis). Retrieved from https://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/96788

Liu, Y., Huang, K., Bao, J., & Chen, K. (2019). Listen to the voices from home: An analysis of Chinese tourists’ sentiments regarding Australian destinations. Tourism Management, 71, 337–347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2018.10.004

Ma, E., Cheng, M., & Hsiao, A. (2018). Sentiment analysis – a review and agenda for future research in hospitality contexts. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 30(11), 3287–3308. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-10-2017-0704

McCleary, K. W., Weaver, P. A., & Lan, L. (1994). Gender-based differences in business travelers': Lodging preferences. Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 35(2), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-8804(94)90019-1

Mellinas, J. P., & Nicolau, J. L. (2020). Let's hook up fast! Hotel reviews and Wi-Fi flaws. Annals of Tourism Research, 80, Article 102842. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2019.102842

Memarzadeh, F., & Chang, H. J. (2015). Online Consumer Complaints About Southeast Asian Luxury Hotels. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 24(1), 76–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2014.893222

Mendes Filho, L. A. M., Tan, F. B., & Mills, A. (2012). User-Generated Content and travel planning: An application of the Theory of Planned Behavior. Revista Brasileira De Pesquisa Em Turismo. São Paulo, 6(3), 280–289. https://doi.org/10.7784/rbtur.v6i3.543

Mey, L. P., Akbar, A. K., & Fie, D. Y. G. (2006). Measuring Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction of the Hotels in Malaysia: Malaysian, Asian and Non-Asian Hotel Guests. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 13(2), 144–160. https://doi.org/10.1375/jhtm.13.2.144

Mimno, D., Wallach, H., Talley, E., Leenders, M., & McCallum, A. (2011). Optimizing Semantic Coherence in Topic Models. In R. Barzilay & M. Johnson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 262–272). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/D11-1024

Molina-González, M. D., Martínez-Cámara, E., Martín-Valdivia, M-T., & Perea-Ortega, J. M. (2013). Semantic orientation for polarity classification in Spanish reviews. Expert Systems with Applications, 40(18), 7250–7257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.06.076

Newman, D., Noh, Y., Talley, E., Karimi, S., & Baldwin, T. (2010). Evaluating Topic Models for Digital Libraries. In J. Hunter (Ed.), 10th Annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 215–224). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1816123.1816156

O'Connor, P. (2010). Managing a Hotel's Image on TripAdvisor. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 19(7), 754–772. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2010.508007

Öğüt, H., & Onur Taş, B. K. O. (2012). The influence of Internet customer reviews on the online sales and prices in hotel industry. The Service Industries Journal, 32(2), 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2010.529436

Olorunsola, V. O., Saydam, M. B., Lasisi, T. T., & Eluwole, K. K. (2023). Customer experience management in capsule hotels: a content analysis of guest online review. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHTI-03-2022-0113

Oueslati, O., Cambria, E., HajHmida, M. B., & Ounelli, H. (2020). A review of sentiment analysis research in Arabic language. Future Generation Computer Systems, 112, 408–430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2020.05.034

Petry, T. R. E., Pickler, C. M., & Tomelin, C. A. (2016). A Percepção dos hóspedes de negócios quanto ao desempenho da qualidade dos serviços prestados nos hotéis de Florianópolis: Uma análise a partir do conteúdo gerado no website Booking.com [Perceptions of Business Guests of the Quality of Services Provided in Hotels of Florianópolis: An Analysis Based on Content Generated on Website Booking.com]. Turismo, Visão e Ação, 18(2), 327–352. http://doi.org/10.14210/rtva.v18n2.p327-352

Priyantina, R. A., & Sarno, R. (2019). Sentiment Analysis of Hotel Reviews Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Semantic Similarity and LSTM. International Journal of Intelligent Engineering and Systems, 12(4), 142–155. https://doi.org/10.22266/ijies2019.0831.14

Qu, H., Ryan, B., & Chu, R. (2000). The Importance of Hotel Attributes in Contributing to Travelers' Satisfaction in the Hong Kong Hotel Industry. Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism, 1(3), 65–83. https://doi.org/10.1300/J162v01n03_04

Radojevic, T., Stanisic, N., Stanic, N., & Davidson, R. (2018). The effects of traveling for business on customer satisfaction with hotel services. Tourism Management, 67, 326–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2018.02.007

Sánchez-García, I., & Currás-Pérez, R. (2011). Effects of dissatisfaction in tourist services: The role of anger and regret. Tourism Management, 32(6), 1397–1406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2011.01.016

Scott, N., Laws, E., & Boksberger, P. (2009). The Marketing of Hospitality and Leisure Experiences. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 18(2-3), 99–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368620802590126

Shoval, N., McKercher, B., Ng, E., & Birenboim, A. (2011). Hotel location and tourist activity in cities. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4), 1594–1612. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.02.007

Siguaw, J. A., Simpson, P. M., & Kasikci, A. (2006). Exploratory Evidence About Differences Between Guest Types and Purpose of Stay in a Luxury Experience. Journal of Hospitality & Leisure Marketing, 14, 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1300/J150v14n01_02

Sparks, B. A., & Browning, V. (2010). Complaining in Cyberspace: The Motives and Forms of Hotel Guests' Complaints Online. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 19(7), 797–818. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2010.508010

Stevens, K., Kegelmeyer, P., Andrzejewski, D., & Buttler, D. (2012). Exploring Topic Coherence over Many Models and Many Topics. In J. Tsujii, J. Henderson, & M. Paşca (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (pp. 952–961). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/D12-1000

Su, A. Y.-L. (2004). Customer satisfaction measurement practice in Taiwan hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 23(4), 397–408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2004.02.002

Sutherland, I., Sim, Y., Lee, S. K., Byun, J., & Kiatkawsin, K. (2020). Topic Modeling of Online Accommodation Reviews via Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Sustainability, 12(5), Article 1821. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12051821

Tepavčević, J., Blešić, I., Bradić, M., Ivkov, M., & Stefanović, V. (2016). Važnost lokacije i eksterijera gradskih hotela kao elemenata zadovoljstva gostiju [Importance of location and exterior of city hotels as elements of guest satisfaction]. Arhitektura i urbanizam, 43, 7–16. https://doi.org/10.5937/a-u0-10706

Tirunillai, S., & Tellis, G. J. (2012). Does Chatter Really Matter? Dynamics of User-Generated Content and Stock Performance. Marketing Science, 31(2), 198–215. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1110.0682

Toumaala, V. (2005). Congress Kokkola: The Research of Facilities and Additional Services in the Town of Kokkola and its Surroundings. Retrieved from https://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/87322

Wu, J., & Zhao, N. (2023). What consumer complaints should hoteliers prioritize? Analysis of online reviews under different market segments. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 32(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2022.2119187

Xiang, Z., Schwartz, Z., Gerdes Jr, J. H., & Uysal, M. (2015). What can big data and text analytics tell us about hotel guest experience and satisfaction? International Journal of Hospitality Management, 44, 120–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2014.10.013

Xie, K. L., Chen, C., & Wu, S. (2016). Online Consumer Review Factors Affecting Offline Hotel Popularity: Evidence from Tripadvisor. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 33(2), 211–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/10548408.2015.1050538

Xu, X., & Li, Y. (2016). The antecedents of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward various types of hotels: A text mining approach. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 55, 57–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2016.03.003

Xu, X., Liu, W., & Gursoy, D. (2019). The Impacts of Service Failure and Recovery Efforts on Airline Customers’ Emotions and Satisfaction. Journal of Travel Research, 58(6), 1034–1051. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287518789285

Zhao, Y., Xu, X., & Wang, M. (2019). Predicting overall customer satisfaction: big data evidence from hotel online textual reviews. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 76, 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2018.03.017

Zheng, L., Wang, H., & Gao, S. (2018). Sentimental feature selection for sentiment analysis of Chinese online reviews. International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 9(1), 75–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-015-0347-4

Zhu, J., Wang, H., Zhu, M., Tsou, B. K., & Ma, M. (2011). Aspect-Based Opinion Polling from Customer Reviews. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2(1), 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.2