Refreshing hotel satisfaction studies by reconfiguring customer review data

• Re-used online reviews to assess customers’ experience in upscale hotels in Hangzhou.
• Four groups of attributes – satisfiers, dissatisfiers, bidirectional forces and neutrals – were identified.
• Different hotel levels and management styles varied in terms of customer satisfaction.
• Guests from different origins perceived the hotel performance differently.
• Implications for both hotel managers and researchers were offered.

This study reconfigures the user generated content in online hotel reviews to provide comparative and benchmarking insights about customer satisfaction. Hangzhou, an emerging tourism city in China, was selected for the study. Over a thousand user-generated reviews about four and five star hotels that were posted on Agoda.com were coded and analysed. Seventeen attributes influencing customer satisfaction were identified. The attributes were classified on the type of influence exerted: satisfiers (work in a solely positive direction), dissatisfiers (work in an exclusively negative direction), bidirectional forces (influence either positive or negative outcomes), and neutrals (no marked influence). The approach enabled the comparison of customer satisfaction between 4 and 5 star hotels, properties with different ownership, and the views of guests from different origins. The study suggests that a focused reclassification of the online review data can deliver powerful customer feedback messages for both researchers and hotel managers.