Abstract
User reviews are a new source of information in the hospitality and tourism sector. Usually, these reviews contain comments of users and assessments expressed through ordered qualitative scales. The website Booking.com uses a smiley face scale to ask users the degree of satisfaction regarding several aspects of accommodations. The scoring system of the website assigns numerical values to each item of the smiley face scale. However, when users perceive different proximities between pairs of items of an ordered qualitative scale, these numerical codifications are because they may misrepresent the original ordinal information. In this paper, we analyze the drawbacks and limitations of the scoring system of Booking.com and we manage its smiley face scale through a purely ordinal procedure. This procedure avoids assigning numerical codifications to items of scales and it takes into account how users perceive the proximities between pairs of items. The findings show the importance of considering how users understand qualitative scales when they face subjective assessments through ordered qualitative scales.
Highlights
In the recent years, the development of Internet has enabled a rapid expansion of ecommerce
In order to deal with ordered qualitative scales in a purely ordinal way and to avoid distorted results, we propose using the concept of ordinal proximity measure introduced by [25]
In order to avoid the arbitrary numerical codifications to the items of the smiley face scale used by Booking.com and to consider only the qualitative information provided by the scale, we consider the above-mentioned ordinal procedure
Summary
The development of Internet has enabled a rapid expansion of ecommerce. We analyze the drawbacks and limitations of the scoring system of Booking.com and we propose handling its smiley face scale in an ordinal way by means of the notion of ordinal procedure introduced in [26] This procedure avoids assigning numerical codifications to items of scales and it considers how users perceive the proximities between the items of the scale. Booking.com publishes the reviews of users through a different ordered qualitative scale formed by five linguistic terms, {very poor, poor, okay, good, wonderful}, for every score range. This final score might not be fair for some users, because depending on how they interpret the smiley faces, some of them can think that Hotel 7 is better than Hotel 2, while other users may consider just the opposite
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