In search of patterns among travellers' hotel ratings in TripAdvisor

• This paper examines travellers' rating patterns for independent and chain hotels.
• Five traveller profiles are considered: business, couple, family, friend and solo.
• Four regions are considered: America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Middle East-Africa.
• Data were collected from the popular hotel review website TripAdvisor.
• Rating patterns for both hotel types differed across profiles and regions.

This paper sheds light on ways travellers' rating patterns in the hotel review website TripAdvisor differ between independent and chain hotels. To delve deeper, travellers were classified according to their profiles, namely, business, couple, family, friend and solo. Besides, hotels straddled across four geographical regions, namely, America, Asia Pacific, Europe as well as Middle East and Africa. A 5 (profiles) × 4 (regions) two-way factorial analysis of variance was conducted separately for independent and chain hotels. A qualitative analysis was further conducted to tease out the findings from the quantitative analyses. Travellers' rating patterns were found to differ substantially between independent and chain hotels across both profiles as well as regions. The paper concludes by highlighting its implications, limitations and potential directions for future research.