Explaining customer satisfaction via hotel reviews: A comparison between pre- and post-COVID-19 reviews

ABSTRACT

This study aims to examine whether and how COVID-19 has changed the effects of consumer evaluations of hotel attributes on customer satisfaction. We extracted positive and negative evaluations of hotel attributes from online reviews both pre- and post-COVID-19 and examined their effects on customer satisfaction. Using a sample of 1,947,391 reviews of 35,022 Chinese hotels collected from ctrip.com, we conducted a fine-grained sentiment analysis based on sentiment triples to identify important positive and negative evaluations of hotel attributes. Subsequently, we applied regression analyses to examine how these evaluations of hotel attributes influenced customer satisfaction. The results revealed that positive and negative evaluations of hotel attributes had differentiated effects on customer satisfaction. We classified these attributes into basic, excitement, and performance attributes, from which management implications can be derived.