Determinants of hotel guests’ service experiences: an examination of differences between lifestyle and traditional hotels

Abstract

This study explores hotel guest service experiences by analyzing online reviews using big data analytics. We first summarize frequently mentioned words in online reviews, identify the commonalities on the basis of frequency of word use, and use these factors to compare the contributions to the overall guest experience for lifestyle and traditional hotels. Overall, guestrooms, interaction between employees and guests, and hotel services show different magnitudes of coefficients in lifestyle hotels compared with traditional hotels. Applying sentiment analysis, results indicated that attributes representing negative sentiment affected overall review ratings more than those representing positive sentiment. However, positive and negative employee interactions in the lifestyle hotel segment were more important in the overall reviews than in the traditional hotel segment. This study offers beneficial insights into the uniqueness of lifestyle hotels and future research directions.