Power in praise: Exploring online compliments on luxury hotels in Malaysia

Abstract

Compliments are not only an indication of satisfaction but a broader range of motives relating to consumer behavior. They represent a potent form of feedback to businesses and their potential for helping to shape both organizational and individual behaviors may be greater than that of customer complaints. Despite the constantly increasing number of published work on the use of internet in hospitality literature, relatively little has been written on how guests use the internet to share their positive experiences. Keeping this in mind, this present research seeks to examine the compliments posted by guests who have stayed at five-star hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This paper identifies, through a qualitative analysis of 220 scripts, the kinds of compliments given and provides important implications to hoteliers. The results show “rooms,” “staff,” “food,” “services,” and “location” are the top five factors that guests applause. Discussion of these findings and implications of the results are also provided.