Visitors’ satisfaction towards indoor environmental quality in Australian hotels and serviced apartments

Abstract

Tourism is Australia’s fourth-largest exporting sector, yet insufficient research has been done on how satisfied guests are with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of Australian guest homes. This project utilised web-mining, natural language processing and aspect-based sentiment analysis to analyse visitors’ IEQ satisfaction in Australian tourist accommodations across ten tourism cities. By analysing 543,213 IEQ-related reviews from 1397 hotels and serviced apartments with two-stars and above at the Booking.com, guests’ text comments were classified by semi-supervised word-embedding based models into nine IEQ dimensions. Using a cutting-edge custom-trained bidirectional context-aware deep sequence model, sentiment scores were computed to estimate the degree of IEQ satisfaction. Results showed that guests were most dissatisfied with facilities, cleanliness and maintenance, and acoustics. IEQ dissatisfaction reduced as the buildings’ star ratings rose, except for thermal, lighting, exterior view, and layout and design dimensions. There was a small effect of seasonal fluctuations on the levels of dissatisfaction with thermal conditions, indoor air quality, and cleanliness and maintenance. All IEQ dimensions, excluding indoor air quality, showed small effects on the percentage of dissatisfied visitors across climate zones. During the pandemic, there was a significant decline in the guests’ evaluation scores. Notwithstanding, the IEQ satisfaction was scarcely affected by COVID-19, except for indoor air quality, cleanliness and maintenance, and facilities. This study’s findings can serve as a rationale for the Australian hospitality industry to enhance visitor satisfaction.