Exploring Online Travel Reviews Using Data Analytics: An Exploratory Study

• Type: Another Publication in an International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2017

Authors

Vera L. Miguéis (Author) FEUP; Maria Henriqueta Nóvoa (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Service Science

Vol. 9

Pages: 315-323

ISSN: 2164-3962

Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 8 Citations

Scopus - 11 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00N-9RZ

DOI: 10.1287/serv.2017.0189

Abstract (EN): The information provided by online traveler reviews is becoming a key element in the decision-making process of hotel customers, reducing the uncertainty and the perceived risk of a traveler. Therefore, a careful analysis of the content provided by online customers' reviews might give invaluable information concerning the key determinants, from a user's perspective, of the quality of the service provided, justifying the attributed service rating. The objectives of this study are twofold: (1) use text-mining techniques to analyze the user's generated content automatically collected from hotels in Porto in a certain period of time and, from this analysis, derive the most frequent terms used to describe the service; (2) understand whether it is possible to predict the aggregated rating assigned by reviewers based on the terms used and, at the same time, identify the terms showing high predictive capacity. Our study attempts to support hotel service managers in achieving their strategic and tactical goals by using innovative text- and data-mining tools to explore the wealth of information provided by user generated content in an easy and timely way.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 9