Customer-Oriented Strategic Planning for Hotel Competitiveness Improvement Based on Online Reviews

Abstract

The hotel industry has been facing fierce competition in recent years. It is important for hotels to conduct effective strategic planning for competitiveness improvement to achieve sustainable development. Prior studies on hotel strategic planning mainly use questionnaire data or hotel internal data, which have the problems of insufficient data or neglecting customer perspectives. The purpose of this study was to develop an integrated method for customer-oriented strategic planning for hotel competitiveness improvement based on text mining of online reviews. First, text mining of online reviews was conducted to extract customer-concerned service attributes and evaluate customer concern level and the performance of the service attributes through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and sentiment analysis. Second, the competitive structures of the hotels were analyzed and the main competitors were identified from the competitive hotels through correspondence analysis. Third, SWOT analysis of the target hotel toward the main competitors was conducted, and the priorities of factors in each SWOT category were determined. An empirical study on a five-star hotel is given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method can help managers in strategic planning to obtain more specific strategies for hotel competitiveness improvement.