Classifying Quality Attributes of Hotel Services Considering Review Characteristics and Semantic Consistency: A Review-Driven IPA

ABSTRACTService quality is associated with customer satisfaction and a determinant to success of hospitality enterprises. Different types of quality attributes affect customer satisfaction in varying degrees. Online reviews offer opportunities and challenges in terms of building importance-performance analysis (IPA). Considering review characteristics and semantic consistency, this paper explores a review-driven IPA that achieves the classification of service quality attributes, based on which appropriate improvement strategies are generated for hotel services. First, measuring service quality from online reviews is conducted to convert the voice of customer into requirements associated with service quality. The performance of the attributes is estimated by considering multiple aspects with different proportions among reviews. Second, the importance estimation is advanced with a newly defined semantic consistency that can reflect customers’ actual preferences, ensuring the reliability of the classifications. Subsequently, the proposed method is validated by applying it to chained-brand hotels in Hong Kong together with correlation and comparison analyses. The derived results contribute theoretically to service quality analysis and IPA, while providing meaningful findings to the hospitality sector.KEYWORDS: Service qualityonline reviewsclassificationIPAreview characteristicssemantic consistency AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72301277) ,the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2023QN1052) and the Project of Philosophy and Social Science Fund of Universities in Jiangsu Province (No. 2023SJYB1050).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chained-brand_hotelsAdditional informationFundingThe work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72301277], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2023QN1052] and the Project of Philosophy and Social Science Fund of Universities in Jiangsu Province [2023SJYB1050].