Understanding homophily of service failure within the hotel guest cycle: Applying NLP-aspect-based sentiment analysis to the hospitality industry

Abstract

• This study applies the supervised learning approach (Natural Language Processing, NLP-Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis) and attempts to understand the potential differences in online behavioral tendencies between Asian and non-Asian guests who encounter service failures within the hotel guest cycle. • The empirical research data derived from a total of 390,236 online complaint terms posted about 353 hotels in the UK by hotel guests from 63 nations. • With consideration given to the homophily theory, the study argued that Asian and non-Asian guests would exhibit both similarities and differences with respect to the various items of service failures they encountered within the hotel guest cycle. • This study contributes to the existing literature in the field of hotel guest satisfaction attributes, with special reference to the novel application of the methodology, as well as the new findings it presents on the differences in perceptions of service failures among guests with different cultures of origins. Online complaints have become increasingly influential on the purchasing behavior of customers in recent years. In an effort analyze large quantities of textual complaints and detail the various aspects of them, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis was looked to as an ideal framework to take on the task. This study set out to synthesize specific service failure items and categorize them into the groupings related to the hotel guest cycle and the corresponding operations, then compare the patterns of expression used by Asian and Non-Asian guests as the related their hotel experiences. A total of 390,236 online complaint terms posted about 353 hotels in the UK by hotel guests from 63 nations were manually derived from TripAdvisor for analysis. With consideration given to the homophily theory, we posited that Asian and non-Asian guests would exhibit similarities and differences with respect to the service failures they encountered when presented with various items of service. The results confirmed this as Asian guests were shown to encounter more service failures with respect to the engineering segment of operations (e.g. hotel room equipment issues), while non-Asian guests encountered more service failures on the housekeeping end of operations (e.g. toilets, public areas, cleanliness, and bedding). By organizing the failures according the four stages of the guest cycle, it was observed that approximately 80% of the service failures occurred during the occupancy period. This study contributes to the existing literature on hotel guest satisfaction both with respect to the methodology it uses and the new findings it presents on differences in perceptions of service failures members among different cultures.