Exploring Customers Experience and Satisfaction with Theme Hotels: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Hotel Reviews

Abstract

There is a generalized global market trend that tourists and consumers tend to pursue “themed” experiences closely related to their preferences or specific purposes. In the accommodation sector, the concept of “themed” is reflected by various theme hotels such as green hotels, family hotels, E-sports hotels, etc. In the era of Web 2.0, online information has been testified to be one of the most effective data sources for understanding customers and developing relative marketing strategies. Therefore, this research examined online customer reviews with both quantitative and qualitative methods to extract a range of variables reflecting customers’ experiences, and then, to explore their contribution to customers’ satisfaction/dissatisfaction with theme hotels; to understand theme hotels and develop novel insights for the industry, with new data sources. Moreover, a cross-cultural perspective was applied to examine the differences among different markets, so that more specific and targeted marketing strategies could be developed to develop and promote theme hotels. As a result, different clusters reflecting customers’ understanding of two areas have been applied. In addition, it was demonstrated that the connection between customer experience and satisfaction can be utilized to distinguish the differences between the two areas.