Does traveler satisfaction differ in various travel group compositions? Evidence from online reviews
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
ISSN: 0959-6119
Article publication date: 19 March 2018
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the online customer review behavior and determinants of overall satisfaction with hotels of travelers in various travel group compositions.
Design/methodology/approach
The author collected data from online reviews of travelers in various travel group compositions from 600 hotels in 100 of the largest cities in the USA from Booking.com and used latent semantic analysis (LSA) to identify the positive and negative factors from online reviews of travelers in various travel group compositions. Then, text regression was used to determine the influential factors of overall satisfaction of travelers in various travel group compositions.
Findings
It was found in this study that not all the positive and negative textual factors mined from travelers’ online reviews significantly influenced their overall satisfaction. In addition, the determinants of traveler satisfaction were different when travelers were in different travel group compositions.
Research limitations/implications
The author found similar online review behavior, but different basic, excitement and performance factors of travelers in different travel group compositions.
Practical implications
This study helps hoteliers understand customers’ perception of the specific attributes of their products and services, which provides a guideline for businesses to design the priority rule to improve these corresponding attributes and use market segmentation strategy when dealing with customers in different travel group compositions.
Originality/value
The author examined and compared the online review behavior and determinants of satisfaction using the factors mined from online reviews between travelers in various travel group compositions. This study combined customer ratings with textual reviews and predicted customer ratings from the factors extracted from textual reviews using LSA and text regression.
Keywords
Citation
Xu, X. (2018), "Does traveler satisfaction differ in various travel group compositions? Evidence from online reviews", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 1663-1685. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-03-2017-0171
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited