Effect of trip mode on opinion about hotel aspects: A social media analysis approach

Abstract

• Top fifty hotel aspects as per travelers' expectation extracted from online reviews . • The hotel aspects, except for top ones, vary in ranking depending on trip mode. • Introduced the concept of Opinion Ratio to understand features which play a role in negative reviews. • Room, the most important aspect, is also the one which solicits highest positive as well as negative perception. There is rich literature on the hotel aspects perceived important by travelers, which are mostly based on hotel aspects extracted from questionnaires or previous studies, and fail to include the changing expectation of customers. Most of these further ignore the possibility that people traveling for diverse purpose might have different expectations from their hotels. Current study uses aspect based sentiment analysis technique to dynamically extract aspects of hotels which are perceived important by the travelers from the online hotel reviews, and then use the opinions expressed for these aspects to understand the expectations of the travelers travelling in different trip modes, viz., solo, family, friend, couple, and business. The study also contributes in term of deciphering hotel aspects those are important as per customer expectation and which solicit higher negative perception. This study also contributes a methodology towards ascertaining travelers' preference based on readily available voluminous social media content.