Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews: A Proposed Method

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to measure hotel service quality from online consumer reviews and ratings. In essence, a word frequency analysis is performed on comments collected from a website such as TripAdvisor, and these frequencies are used to obtain a score for each of the following dimensions: Room, Facilities, Surroundings, Employees and Reliability. A comparison of scores can be made based on the ratings that consumers give, and/or can be studied over time. The method offers researchers and hotel managers a useful new tool, which can guide quality improvement efforts and help focus marketing communication. In this paper the development of the approach is described, and a short example is presented where the method is applied on a single hotel.