University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing
Abstract
OVERVIEW
User-generated content, shared with other users through social media, has increased considerably in the previous decade. In particular, the content generated by travelers, mainly online travel reviews (OTRs), has grown dramatically. This abundant recorded information has served as a basis for conducting numerous research on big data and social media analytics. Reviewers share their OTRs on travel-related websites including peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation platforms and online travel agencies (OTAs). The aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of the state of the art of hospitality and tourism analytics based on OTRs, and explore the possibilities of gaining insight, through OTRs, about perceived image and visitor preferences. In the context of hospitality prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, empirical substantiation is obtained by crossing paratextual data from hotels, registered on TripAdvisor and in three OTAs indexed in the Nasdaq 100 (Booking.com, Expedia and Ctrip), located in five tourist cities (Barcelona, Cape Town, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Sydney). Regarding the content analysis of OTRs text, although there are numerous publications on Airbnb (the main P2P lodging platform), research on the influence of Airbnb OTRs on destination image construction is scarce. Therefore, the content of the Airbnb OTRs of these five cities is explored in search of patterns and metrics that allow us to measure the image perceived and transmitted by visitors.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After completing this chapter, the student will be able to:
- Analyze the relationship between the number of online travel reviews (OTRs) and the number of hotel rooms.
- Compare and assess the positions of hotels in the popularity rankings across different travel-related websites.
- Evaluate the consistency of average hotel scores across multiple travel-related platforms.
- Examine and assess the correlation between hotel star ratings and their popularity or ratings on various travel-related platforms.
- Analyze and evaluate the differences in tourist destination images between cities based on the content of OTRs for P2P accommodations.
DOI
https://www.doi.org/10.5038/9781732127586
Recommended Citation
Marine-Roig, E. (2021). Analytics in hospitality and tourism: Online travel reviews. In C. Cobanoglu, S. Dogan, K. Berezina, & G. Collins (Eds.), Advances in hospitality and tourism information technology (pp. 1–25). USF M3 Publishing. https://www.doi.org/10.5038/9781732127586
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
