Abstract
Online reviews are one of the main influencers of hotel purchase decisions. This study performs an analysis of reviews extracted from well-known online review sources in combination with hotel sales data and concludes that ratings differ according to the language of reviews. Data science tools have been applied to English, Spanish, and Portuguese reviews, revealing that reviews written in English achieve higher ratings when compared with Spanish or Portuguese reviews. A new visualization method is proposed to quickly depict the sentiment of main topics mentioned in reviews, clearly revealing that not all customers are influenced by reviews in the same way or look for the same things in a hotel. This study has great implications for online reviews research and for hotel management as it clearly shows that language can be used to identify preferences of guests from different origins and because it gives hoteliers more information on how to provide a better service according to guests’ cultural background.
Highlights
Price, location, hotel facilities, loyalty programs, and design are some of the factors that drive a customer to choose a hotel (Anderson 2012; Cantallops and Salvi 2014)
Anderson (2012) estimated that a one percentage point increase in a social reputation index can lead to a 0.54% increase in hotel occupancy and a 1.42% increase in hotel revenue per available room
Öğüt and Onur Taş (2012) demonstrated that a one percentage point increase in a social reputation index can lead to an occupancy increase of up to 2.68%
Summary
Location, hotel facilities, loyalty programs, and design are some of the factors that drive a customer to choose a hotel (Anderson 2012; Cantallops and Salvi 2014). As the widespread use of the Internet has promoted the growth of user-generated content on social media platforms, online reviews have become another important driver of customers’ hotel booking decisions (Anderson 2012; Duan et al 2016; Cantallops and Salvi 2014; Ye et al 2009). Information about guests’ language or nationality allows a better understanding of cultural differences (Cantallops and Salvi 2014). Studying hotel reviews’ quantitative ratings and their textual components by language could reveal more than each guest’s opinion; it could explain the opinions of groups (Cantallops and Salvi 2014; Schuckert et al 2015a; Han et al 2016). Online reviews from 56 Portuguese hotels (29 city hotels and 27 resort hotels) published on the Booking and TripAdvisor websites were used in conjunction with occupancy data extracted from 8 of these 56 hotels’ property management systems (PMS)
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