Abstract

Tourism is a rapidly developing industry, covering a significant part of the gross domestic product. Understanding clients and meeting their needs is a dominant role to meet the economic objectives of accommodation facilities. The primary objective of the article is to evaluate the sentiment of the customers rating in the purpose of stays at top hotels in the Visegrad Group countries. This objective was accomplished based on exploratory analysis, sentiment analysis and polarity analysis of various types of hotel stays (business travellers, couples, friends, family and solo travellers). The analysis included 117 hotels from the Visegrad Group countries (the Czech Republic = 39-33.3%; Hungary = 15-12.8%; Poland = 56-47.9%; Slovak Republic = 7-6%) and input into analysis were obtained from online booking portal TripAdvisor during July in 2019. The analysis featured 22,400 customer reviews. The exploratory analysis made use of the frequency word cloud charts and association tables. In this section, it was found that there were no significant differences between the concept and syntax. The only difference is noticeable in solo travellers. The sentiment analysis assessed the relative frequencies of the sentiment, where significant differences were found in three of the ten analyzed areas – positive, trust, sadness. The last part of the analyzes assessed polarity (negative or positive review). However, no significant difference was found. Overall, the polarity of the positive outputs exceeded that of the negative outputs. Differential tests such as ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis test or Welch test were used to process the previous two parts. The choice of tests was justified by the outcomes of outliers and variance variability. The study points to perfect implementation of customer-oriented marketing theories in the hotels in question, as evidenced by relatively high values of specific areas of sentiment and relatively low differences between customer categories in terms of the type of their stay.

Keywords: sentiment, polarity, hotel, word cloud, difference analysis, Visegrad group, customer satisfaction.

JEL Classification: L83, M30.

Cite as: Bacik, R., Fedorko, R., Gavurova, B., Olearova, M., & Rigelsky, M. (2020). Hotel marketing policy: role of rating in consumer decision making. Marketing and Management of Innovations, 2, 11-25. https://doi.org/10.21272/mmi.2020.2-01

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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