Does the Tourist Appreciate Your Employees? Prioritizing Service Employee Improvements Based on User-Generated Content Mining

Abstract

While a multitude of opinion mining studies have examined the impact of attribute performance on customer satisfaction, they have offered limited insights into the role performance of service employees by investigating tourists’ experiences. Focusing on the hotel industry, this study investigated tourists’ evaluations of service personnel by scrutinizing 68,439 hotel reviews and explored the asymmetric effects of employee performance on customer satisfaction according to service employee functions and traveler types. The results indicate that different travelers have distinct expectations of different kinds of services, thereby moderating the asymmetric impact of role performance on tourist satisfaction. Manager employee, in particular, constitutes an excitement factor for family, solo, and couple travelers. The findings have implications for the formulation of operation strategies to promote tourists’ satisfaction rather than frustration. This study contributes to the literature by offering a novel understanding of the asymmetric effect of customer–personnel interactions on tourist satisfaction.