Understanding Customer Satisfaction With Budget Hotels Through Online Comments: Evidence From Home Inns in China

Abstract

Increasingly, customers rely on online comments for information on hotels to make sound decisions on where to stay. The recently established budget hotel sector is developing rapidly in China, and these hotels currently comprise nearly 40% of all the hotel rooms in the country. This study explores the factors that lead to customer satisfactory or dissatisfactory accommodation experience with budget hotels in China. Data were gathered from nearly 3,000 online comments on Home Inns, the biggest budget hotel chain in China. The comments were initially categorized manually by three researchers on 200 randomly selected comments. NVivo 9 was used for the coding and the content analysis of the comments. We found that customers were mostly concerned with the guest rooms, location, and service quality of the hotels. The perceptions of the previous guests of Home Inns were further analyzed by sub-categorizing their comments. Contextual factors were found to be unique.