Quality of accommodation in Ceará: A study based on TripAdvisor customer reviews

Abstract

The general objective of this study was to investigate the effect of service quality attributes on overall customer satisfaction, according to data from the TripAdvisor website. The sample was composed of the 43 most popular tourist destinations in Ceará, in a total of 2,293 tourist accommodation facilities, whose reviews were collected by a crawler and later analyzed by a parser, both implemented in Py-thon language. The results were obtained by quantitative methods. The results suggest that improve-ments in room layout, service, and cleanliness, can increase customer satisfaction, since these attributes are those that most affect customer reviews. Other findings showed that the top-rated es-tablishments are mainly on the coast, particularly in Jericoacoara. Also, accommodation facilities located in bigger and more populous municipalities are, on average, less likely to score the highest for overall satisfaction, and over time guests tend to become more demanding, thus lowering the overall satisfaction scores.