Title: Diving into online ratings to determine hotels' improvement priorities

Authors: Ioannis Zisos; Evangelos Grigoroudis; Nikolaos Matsatsinis; Athanasios Spyridakos

Addresses: School of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, University Campus, Kounoupidiana, GR73100 Chania, Greece ' School of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, University Campus, Kounoupidiana, GR73100 Chania, Greece ' School of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, University Campus, Kounoupidiana, GR73100 Chania, Greece ' School of Business and Economics, Department of Business and Administration, Piraeus University of Applied Sciences, 250 P. Ralli and Thivon Avenue, GR12244 Aigaleo, Greece

Abstract: Online ratings and reviews are currently considered as extremely effective tools for tourism professionals. Current research reveals that they affect, like no advertisement does, guests' vacation decisions. In this paper we build on existing large scale-survey on customers' ratings to explore the determinants of tourists' satisfaction in different hotel categories. The application of the MUSA method to online reviews has resulted in valuable conclusions regarding the quality of provided services, the identification of factors that influence customers' satisfaction, and the prioritisation of improvement that can improve customers' satisfaction levels. Data are taken from the popular hotel booking website Hotels.com and the case study examines available hotels in Chania, Greece. The final recommendations have been mainly based on the estimated global and partial value functions, the criteria weights, and the average satisfaction, demanding, and improvement indices, as provided by the MUSA method.

Keywords: online ratings; MUSA method; hotels; tourist satisfaction; multicriteria decision analysis; improvement priorities; reviews; data mining; hot deck imputation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDSS.2018.100191

International Journal of Decision Support Systems, 2018 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.238 - 262

Accepted: 15 Jun 2018
Published online: 17 Jun 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article