Solo travellers assign higher ratings than families: Examining customer satisfaction by demographic group

•We explore four different categories of hotel customers with regard to their reported levels of satisfaction.•Over 2 million satisfaction scores assigned to 4310 hotels located in 45 cities were collected and analysed.•Hotels receive the highest scores from solo travellers and the lowest scores from families.•The relative importance of particular hotel and destination attributes varies significantly across the categories.•The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

In this study, we employ big data to explore the characteristics of four different demographic categories of hotel customers with regard to their reported levels of satisfaction. The categories examined are solo travellers, groups of friends, couples, and families. The results show that considerable differences exist within the baseline level of satisfaction and, furthermore, that the importance of certain factors which contribute to satisfaction varies across the categories. The conclusions drawn from this study will be greatly beneficial to managers who aim to target some of these categories while equally providing direction worthy of consideration for future research.