Factors Influencing Customers' Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction with Hotels: A Text-Mining Approach

Abstract

User-generated review of hotels plays an important role in the e-commerce and big data era. The digital and big data era has created novel sources of information that can be used by scholars for knowledge creation, business intelligence, and bringing meaning into unstructured big data. In addition to build a big picture on sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, this study aims to develop results that are more practical for hoteliers. A text-mining approach was applied. Reviews of 10 hotels were collected from TripAdvisor.com for Mazandaran province in Iran. The findings of the research show that "location" appearing 99 times, "room" 53 times, and "staff" and "restaurant" 40 times are the most influential factors that determine positive reviews (customer satisfaction). At the same time, the main determinants of customer dissatisfaction were the words "restaurant," "Wi-Fi," and again "room." Given these results, it can be said that customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction can coexist, as literature shows. In this respect, the factors (e.g., room & restaurant) that make customers satisfied have potential to also make them dissatisfied, if they are not provided and properly delivered. Managerial implications are also discussed.