Wine and satisfaction with fine dining restaurants: an analysis of tourist experiences from user generated content on TripAdvisor

ABSTRACT Social media sites, like TripAdvisor, allow postings of User Generated Content (UGC) that provide restaurant customers with the opportunity of sharing their experiences and recording their satisfaction and dissatisfaction. These activities represent an essential form of electronic word-of-mouth that can influences the decision process of other customers. The paper investigates tourist satisfaction experiences as expressed in UGC on TripAdvisor to determine the role that wine plays in customer satisfaction with fine dining restaurants. A list of the world's top 1000 restaurants is used to identify five top- and five bottom-ranked restaurants and data in the form of six UGC narratives written by tourists on TripAdvisor for each restaurant are collected. Lexical analysis of the sixty narratives collected is undertaken via the Leximancer software. Results are reported, implications are discussed, limitations are noted, and directions for future research are indicated.