Indoor environmental quality satisfaction in Australian hotels and serviced apartments

Abstract

Tourism is Australia's fourth-largest exporting sector, yet little research has been done on how satisfied guests are with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of Australian guest homes. This research project utilized web-mining, natural language processing and sentiment analysis to analyse customers' IEQ satisfaction in Australian tourist accommodations across ten tourism cities. By analysing 543,213 guest reviews from 1,397 hotels and serviced apartments with two-stars and above at the Booking.com, guests' text comments were classified by semi-supervised word-embedding based models into nine IEQ dimensions. Using a bespoke deep sequence model, sentiment polarities were found, and sentiment scores were computed to estimate the degree of IEQ satisfaction. Results showed that guests were most dissatisfied with facilities, cleanliness and maintenance, and acoustics. As the buildings' star ratings increased, dissatisfaction towards thermal environment, indoor air quality (IAQ), and acoustics decreased. Some IEQ dimensions displayed seasonal trends in customer dissatisfaction. The main sources of dissatisfaction with the thermal environment, IAQ, lighting, and acoustics were identified.