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Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews: A Proposed

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-03973-2_27

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Measuring Hotel Service Quality
from Online Consumer Reviews:
A Proposed Method

Edward Boon, Michelle Bonera and Alessandro Bigi

Abstract This paper proposes a new method to measure hotel service quality
from online consumer reviews and ratings. In essence, a word frequency analysis
is performed on comments collected from a website such as TripAdvisor, and
these frequencies are used to obtain a score for each of the following dimensions:
Room, Facilities, Surroundings, Employees and Reliability. A comparison of
scores can be made based on the ratings that consumers give, and/or can be studied
over time. The method offers researchers and hotel managers a useful new tool,
which can guide quality improvement efforts and help focus marketing commu-
nication. In this paper the development of the approach is described, and a short
example is presented where the method is applied on a single hotel.

Keywords Service quality  HOLSERV  TripAdvisor  Consumer-generated

content

1 Introduction

Imagine that you are a hotel manager, and you care about your customers. You
actively collect and read feedback forms, and each year you perform a service
quality survey. But you wonder: with so many people leaving reviews of my hotel

E. Boon (&)  A. Bigi

Department of Industrial Marketing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm,
Sweden
e-mail: ecjboon@gmail.com
A. Bigi
e-mail: abigi@kth.se
M. Bonera
Dipartimento di Economia e Management, Università degli studi di Brescia, Brescia, Italy
e-mail: mbonera@eco.unibs.it

Z. Xiang and I. Tussyadiah (eds.), Information and Communication 367

Technologies in Tourism 2014, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-03973-2_27,
 Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
368 E. Boon et al.

on websites such as TripAdvisor, do I really still need these surveys? You go

online and check your hotel’s rating: Your 4-star rating is higher than many other
hotels in your area, but that doesn’t tell you much. You start reading the reviews.
The first says they liked the location and the restaurant, the second mentioned the
cleanliness of the room, and the third thought the reception staff were unfriendly.
Then you notice that there are 1,649 reviews and that you cannot possibly process
all that information. Surely there must be a more efficient way to use online
consumer reviews to measure service quality.
The method proposed in this paper does just that: measure service quality from
reviews that consumers leave on sites such as TripAdvisor. It offers hotel managers
a way to make sense out of online reviews, and it gives researchers a useful tool to
study customer feedback and perceived service quality. The principle behind the
method is to apply the dimensions of service quality (from for example the
SERVQUAL scale) to online consumer reviews. This is done by comparing word
frequencies in these reviews with a predetermined word list for each dimension,
and clustering the data based on rating, to determine which dimension is men-
tioned most for high ratings vs. low ratings. Although the method is not meant to
replace service quality surveys, it offers hotel managers a second source of
information that is easy and potentially cheaper to obtain.
This paper’s research question is therefore: Is it possible to apply a service
quality scale to online consumer reviews, and obtain a score for different service
quality dimensions? Three studies were conducted in sequence: the first to assess a
number of different scales for their usefulness; the second to test whether it is
possible to assign one or more dimensions to comments based on words that
reviewers use; and the third to determine the complete word list for each
dimension. Finally, to demonstrate the usefulness of the method, it was applied to
500 consumer comments of a hotel in Dublin, Ireland.
The importance of consumer reviews has been acknowledged widely, and
researchers are aware of the necessity for companies to monitor and manage their
online reputation (e.g. O’Connor 2010; Ye et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2010).
However, as far as the authors are aware no research has linked online reviews
with service quality. This paper aims to fill this gap by offering a systematic and
practical way for hospitality organizations and researchers to learn from consumer
feedback. Online consumer reviews have the potential to provide a wealth of
information about consumers’ attitudes and how they prioritize different elements
of service quality, which can be assessed for individual hotels as well as to
compare different locations, user ratings or classification levels (stars).
The paper starts with a discussion of the theory regarding online consumer
reviews, and of service quality measurement. Next, the methodology of the three
studies is explained, and the results of each are summarized. Finally, in the dis-
cussion section the findings from the three studies are combined, the proposed
methodology is described in detail, and an example is shown where the method-
ology is applied to a single hotel.
Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews 369

2 Theory

2.1 Online Word-of-Mouth and TripAdvisor

The importance of word-of-mouth for marketers has been widely supported in

academic research (Richins 1983; Haywood 1989; Herr et al. 1991; Anderson
1998; Harrison-Walker 2001). So has the impact that online word-of-mouth
platforms have had on how consumers share their positive and negative experi-
ences (Dellarocas 2003; Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Trusov et al. 2009).
The relevance of electronic word-of-mouth has also been acknowledged by
researchers in hospitality management. For example, Litvin et al. (2008) suggest
that word-of-mouth is particularly important in hospitality because of the intan-
gibility of its products, and their research showed that managing word-of-mouth is
relatively cost-effective. Zhang et al. (2010) found that online reviews have a
direct effect on the popularity of restaurants, while Vermeulen and Seegers (2009)
drew the similar conclusion for hotels: positive reviews can increase awareness
and improve consumers’ attitudes. Finally, Ye et al. (2009) found a significant
relationship between hotels’ online ratings and their business performance.
TripAdvisor, part of e-commerce company Expedia and the subject of the
studies described in this paper, is the largest online network of travel consumers
(O’Connor 2010). Its primary purpose is to collect and disseminate user generated
content (such as review, ratings and photos) about hospitality companies such as
restaurants and hotels (O’Connor 2008).

2.2 Measuring Service Quality

Although service quality no longer gets as much attention from researchers as one
or two decades ago, its importance cannot be overstated. It is strongly linked with
word-of-mouth and customer satisfaction, and indirectly with purchase intention
and customer loyalty (Cronin and Taylor 1992; Harrison-Walker 2001; Suresh-
chandar et al. 2002). Research by Chang and Chen (1998) indicates that service
quality is an important antecedent to business profitability. Most of the research
conducted regarding service quality was conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s,
and resulted in a large number of conceptual models and measurement instruments
(see Seth et al. 2005).
Service quality is often defined as an attitude; the perceived difference (or gap)
between expectation and performance (Parasuraman et al. 1985; Seth et al. 2005).
Its most popular measurement scale is SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al. 1988,
2004), which is based on the premise that service quality consists of five dimen-
sions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Although
SERVQUAL is not without criticism because of both conceptual and methodo-
logical concerns (Carman 1990; Babakus and Boller 1992; Buttle 1996), it is the
370 E. Boon et al.

most commonly used scale for service quality and it therefore seems appropriate to
consider it as one of our options to divide TripAdvisor comments into different
service quality dimensions.
SERVQUAL has also been used in research that focused on the hospitality
industry, with varying results. Saleh and Ryan (1991) applied SERQUAL suc-
cessfully in a study of consumers’ perception of service quality in hotels, and
Akbaba (2006) confirmed that there were five dimensions but found a different
factor structure. A number of researchers developed adapted measurement scales,
including HOLSERV (Mei et al. 1999) and LODGSERV (Knutson et al. 1990) for
hotels and DINESERV (Stevens et al. 1995) for restaurants.

3 Methodology

To develop the method three studies were performed in sequence. The purpose of
the first study was to select the service quality scale that would be appropriate, i.e.
whose dimensions are most distinctive and meaningful when they are applied to
consumer reviews. To test the scales three researchers separately tried to assign the
dimensions to 48 TripAdvisor comments that had been selected randomly (from
12 different hotels in 4 different English-speaking locations). Afterwards the
results from different researchers were compared and discussed to select the
appropriate scale to continue with. The second study was very similar to the first,
as again the three researchers categorized the same 48 comments along the
dimensions of the chosen scale. However, this time the purpose was to explore
which words in the reviews were representative of each dimension.
The third study was different: a large database was used of over 10,000
TripAdvisor comments for 90 hotels in Northern Italy, which was available from
another (unpublished) study. The comments were analyzed using RapidMiner, an
open-source data mining program (Rapid-I 2013). First, with RapidMiner the
words of all comments were ranked based on their overall frequency (or total word
count). Next, each of the three researchers assigned each of these top-1000 words
to a dimension. Words that were irrelevant were ignored, and words that were
ambiguous were isolated for later discussion.

4 Results

4.1 Study 1—Selecting the Service Quality Scale

Two scales were selected as starting points: SERVQUAL and HOLSERV.

SERVQUAL has five dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance
and empathy), while HOLSERV has a significantly different structure with the
Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews 371

Table 1 (a) SERVQUAL dimensions, (b) HOLSERV dimensions

Dimension Description
a
Tangibles Physical facilities, equipment, and appearance of personnel
Reliability Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately
Responsiveness Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service
Assurance Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and
confidence
Empathy Caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers
b
Employees Prompt service, willingness to help, confident in delivery of service, polite,
knowledgeable, skillful, caring, understanding, sincere, neat and
professional employees
Tangibles Modern-looking equipment, fixtures and fittings, appealing facilities and
materials, comfort, cleanliness, user-friendly equipment and facilities,
variety in food and beverages, operation of services at a convenient time
Reliability Keeping promises, accurate and timely service, safe and secure stay

three dimensions: employees (which includes both behaviour and appearance),

tangibles and reliability. The dimensions for both scales are shown in Table 1,
with descriptions as they can be found in the original papers by Parasaruman et al.
(1988) and Mei et al. (1999). LODGSERV and the altered five-dimensional scale
by Akbaba (2006) were also considered but are very similar to SERVQUAL and
were therefore not studied. Although the analysis was performed for 48 comments,
for this discussion the two comments that are shown in Table 2 will be used as
examples. The table also shows the dimensions that each researcher assigned to the
comments, before the results were discussed.
It is immediately apparent from the table that the researchers categorized the
comments quite differently, and therefore the results had to be discussed in detail.
Regarding SERVQUAL, the researchers found that even during the discussion
they could not reach a common understanding how comments should be scored.
The SERVQUAL instrument relies on exact phrasing of survey questions to make
a distinction between its dimensions, but consumers who leave their review on a
website are not as accurate. For example, in comment 2 the phrases ‘the service
[was] of the highest standard’ and ‘we greatly appreciated the special treatment’
are unclear, and a case could be made to assign them to any of the following
dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. The only
dimension that was entirely clear was tangibles.
The way comments were categorized using HOLSERV was much more con-
sistent, and it was fairly easy to find common ground when the results were
discussed. Here also the dimension tangibles was entirely clear; as soon as words
like ‘breakfast’ or ‘shower’ were found this dimension was identified. There was
some debate about the distinction between employees and reliability, and it was
therefore agreed that clearly distinctive definitions were required.
 372

Table 2 Sample of results from study 1

# Comment Reviewer SERVQUAL HOLSERV
T R R A E E T R
1. We had an extremely satisfying time here, and would certainly stay again. It ticked all the A X X
boxes, and delivered everything you expect from a central London hotel of this price range, B X X X X
and then some. Breakfast was a particular highlight, and one which we eagerly anticipate in C X X X X X
the future
2. We would like to thank [owner and staff] who looked after us so well on our recent trip back to A X X X X X X
the [hotel] restaurant. Both the food and the service were of the highest standard and we B X X X X X X X
greatly appreciated the special treatment, which is synonymous with [hotel]! We can’t wait C X X X X X X X
to return for another stay and sample the delicious food and superb surroundings. Many
thanks again!
E. Boon et al.
Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews 373

Table 3 HOLSERV Plus dimensions

Dimension Description
Room Equipment, fixtures and fittings in the hotel room, services available in the room.
Cleanliness and user-friendliness
Facilities Facilities and services available in the hotel (outside the room). Breakfast,
restaurants and bars, pool and fitness/spa facilities
Surroundings Location of the hotel, proximity to amenities, public transport and attractions
Employees General appearance and behavior of staff. Promptness, politeness, understanding,
neatness
Reliability The willingness of staff to help guests in specific situations. The way they handle
requests and complaints

This study made it apparent that HOLSERV is a much better instrument for our
purpose than SERVQUAL, because the three dimensions are much more dis-
tinctive. The ambiguity between employees and reliability was fixed as follows:
comments that referred to the staff and the service in a general way were assigned
to employees, while reliability referred to specific problems or actions where the
staff made extra effort to help their guests. This distinction was again tested on the
48 comments, and led to consist scores between researchers.
Another conclusion was drawn from this study: the range of subjects covered by
tangibles is very wide, possibly too much so. Nearly all comments (47 out of 48)
mentioned tangibles. It includes things that are within a hotel manager’s imme-
diate control, such as breakfast and cleanliness, but it can also refer to the style of
the building and the hotel’s location. Therefore the decision was made to test an
adapted version of the HOLSERV scale in which the dimension tangibles was
broken down into three others: room, facilities and surroundings. The researchers
found that scoring along these dimensions was simple because they are very
distinctive, and that it made the results more meaningful. Therefore this adapted
scale was used for consecutive studies, and it will be referred to as HOLSERV
Plus, with the dimensions room, facilities, surroundings, employees and reliability.
Table 3 shows a definition of each dimension.

4.2 Study 2—Exploratory Selection of Key Words

After the scale was selected, the next step was to test whether it is possible to score
comments based on the chosen dimensions, and to identify which words in the
comments are important when dimensions are assigned. Table 4 shows the results
for the same sample comments that were used earlier. In comment 1 the word
‘breakfast’ was the only one that was specific to a particular dimension, namely
facilities. In comment 2 several words were found that allowed dimensions to be
assigned to it: ‘food’ related to facilities, ‘surroundings’ to surroundings, ‘service’
to employees and ‘special treatment’ to reliability.
374 E. Boon et al.

Table 4 Sample of results from study 2

# Comment HOLSERV Plus
1. We had an extremely satisfying here, and would certainly stay Room
again. It ticked all the boxes, and delivered everything you Facilities Breakfast
expect from a central London hotel of this price range, and Surroundings
then some. Breakfast was a particular highlight, and one Employees
which we eagerly anticipate in the future Reliability
2. We would like to thank [owner and staff] who looked after us so Room
well on our recent trip back. Both the food and the service Facilities Food
were of the highest standard and we greatly appreciated the Surroundings Surroundings
special treatment, which is synonymous with [hotel]! We Employees Service
can’t wait to return for another stay and sample the delicious Reliability Special
food and superb surroundings. Many thanks again! treatment

The three researchers scored the comments quite consistently, and in most cases
reached an agreement quite easily when the differences were discussed.
However, it was evident from this study that for many words it is ambiguous to
which dimension it belongs. For example, the words ‘comfortable’ and ‘clean’ can
relate to the room but also to the hotel as a whole, and the word ‘course’ can be
related to the restaurant (the dimension facilities), but can also be from the general
expression ‘of course’. In these cases the word was looked up in multiple com-
ments to see how it was most commonly used (in these particular cases leading to
‘comfortable’ and ‘clean’ being assigned to room, and ‘course’ to facilities). In
some cases a deeper discussion was necessary; for example the word ‘noisy’
normally related to noise outside the hotel, but researchers agreed that although it
is dependent on the hotel’s location (i.e. surroundings), hotel managers have
influence over the noise level, e.g. by installing double glazing or closing a terrace
early, so it was added to the dimension facilities.
Study 2 gave researchers sufficient confidence that a definitive list for each
dimension could be created, and therefore the next study was conducted.

4.3 Study 3—Creation of Word List

This study was performed with a large word frequency list generated from
TripAdvisor comments for hotels in Northern Italy, which was available from
another (unpublished) study. The top-1000 words of this list were each assigned to
a specific dimension; those that could not be assigned would either be labelled
ambiguous (for further discussion) or unclassified (no discussion necessary).
Although RapidMiner removes stop words, many words in the top-1000 were
irrelevant. Only 241 words were considered for the dimensions, out of which 44
were too ambiguous to allocate (e.g. water, park, and entertainment could refer to
different dimensions). The remaining 197 words were assigned to the dimensions
Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews 375

Table 5 Results of study 3

Dimension Words 10 highest-frequency words
Room 46 Room(s), clean, balcony, comfortable, bathroom, shower, bed, towels,
spacious, (air) conditioning
Facilities 63 Food, breakfast, pool, view(s), restaurant, dinner, meal, buffet, buffet,
terrace
Surroundings 54 Lake, Garda, location, walk, town, area, road, centre, local, shops
Employees 21 Staff, friendly, service, helpful, reception, welcome, welcoming, attentive,
polite, rude
Reliability 13 Problem(s), manager, trouble, fault, complaint(s), requested,
management, owner(s), issue, complained

as shown in Table 5; the 10 highest-ranking words for each dimension are also
shown.
Although this analysis resulted in five word lists that seem to satisfy our needs,
a number of things were found that need closer scrutiny. First, the number of
words per dimension varies greatly, from 63 for the dimension facilities to 13 for
reliability. This is not a problem in itself, but it does need to be considered when
results are presented. In particular, results will need to be presented as indices or
percentages rather than total word counts to make comparison between the
dimensions possible. Second, the two highest-frequency words for the dimension
surroundings are Lake and Garda, because the hotels in the database are located at
the Garda Lake. Obviously this same word list cannot be used for hotels at another
location, so either a generic list should be used (which means that location-specific
information will be lost) or a list should be created for each hotel or region
individually (which reduces consistency between studies). Finally, the number of
words in the dimension reliability is very low and they are very similar in
meaning, which indicates that this dimension may not offer very rich data to
researchers. This causes some concern, and should be a focus point during further
application and testing of the dimension word lists.

5 Discussion

Based on the three studies, the conclusion was drawn that, although there are a
number of concerns that need to be addressed, the method should offer researchers
and hotel managers a useful tool to measure service quality. The five dimensions
that were created are distinctive and meaningful, and when the method is applied
to individual hotels it should help managers to focus quality improvement efforts
on the right issues.
376 E. Boon et al.

5.1 Reliability and Validity

Although the initial studies were performed by hand, the idea is that this method
will ultimately be performed by a computer algorithm; an Internet crawler can
copy the comments from the website, the program can perform a word frequency
count, and it can use the standard word list to assign comments to specific
dimensions. Although the researcher will have to monitor and interpret the results,
reliability (i.e. consistency) should not be a major concern.
Validity is a more challenging criterion. The method seems to have face
validity, since it is based on the HOLSERV instrument and its dimensions are
straightforward and logical, but more research (e.g. comparison with survey
results) is necessary to prove a higher level of validity.

5.2 An Example: Best Western Plus Academy Hotel, Dublin

In this example the method was used for a specific hotel to test how easily it could
be applied and how informative it is for researchers and managers. The hotel that
was chosen is the Best Western Plus Academy Plaza Hotel in Dublin because it is
near the ENTER conference location.
Only the 500 most recent comments (out of 1,649) were used, which were
written between 19 February 2012 and 25 June 2013. The comments were copied
manually from TripAdvisor to Excel. The data mining program RapidMiner was
used to calculate word frequencies, both overall and for each rating level (1 to 5
stars). The words were then assigned to a dimension based on the lists from study
3, and the word frequencies for each dimension were summed. Table 6 shows the
indices for each rating level and each dimension versus the average for all ratings
together. The 1-star and 2-star ratings are grouped together because of the low
number of comments for these levels (9 and 16 respectively). Following this, the
word frequency lists (not shown) were inspected to understand the reason behind
noticeably high or low indices.
It is apparent from the table that reviewers who gave the hotel a 1, 2 and 3-star
rating talked a lot about the room, and the frequency list showed that they used the
words ‘tiny’ and ‘small’ much more than average. In particular those who gave a 1
or 2-star rating focused a lot on reliability and employees, indicating that they were
unhappy with the service. The words ‘manager’ and ‘person’ were high up in their
word list which suggests that they had particular issues that were not resolved to
their satisfaction. Although these low-rating reviewers focused less on the hotel’s
facilities, the words ‘parking’ and ‘lobby’ were high on their lists, indicating that
these could be areas of improvement. In contrast, consumers who gave a 4-star
rating seemed particularly pleased with the location of the hotel (surroundings).
Perhaps surprisingly, those who left a 5-star rating focused less on surroundings
but much more on employees, using words such as ‘friendly’, ‘helpful’ and
‘efficient’.
Measuring Hotel Service Quality from Online Consumer Reviews 377

Table 6 Service quality indices for Best Western Plaza, Dublin

Rating Reviews HOLSERV Plus dimensions—index vs. average across ratings
Room Facilities Surroundings Employees Reliability
1 ? 2 stars 25 141 103 54 129 196
3 stars 77 129 103 89 105 84
4 stars 231 98 111 112 90 100
5 stars 167 83 83 96 107 93

It can be concluded that even a rudimentary analysis of a hotel’s service quality

based on TripAdvisor reviews can offer information that is helpful to managers. In
this shown example the results could be used to guide quality improvement efforts
and to determine which message the hotel should focus on in its marketing
communication.

6 Conclusion

This paper proposes a new method to measure service quality from online con-
sumer reviews and ratings. The essence of this method is that a word frequency
analysis is performed with comments that are collected from websites such as
TripAdvisor, and these comments are then assigned to particular service quality
dimensions. The dimensions are based on the HOLSERV scale (Mei et al. 1999),
but were adapted to allow distinction between different tangibles. The five
resulting dimensions are: room, facilities, surroundings, employees and reliability.
In the studies and the example it was shown that, if applied properly, the
method offers hotel managers useful information that can be used to identify
quality improvement points and to guide communication strategy. The index
scores provide insight in what consumers who write reviews focus on, both for low
and high ratings. The word frequency list then offers additional depth to under-
stand consumers’ reasoning. How often the method can be used to measure service
quality depends on the number of reviews that are available on TripAdvisor, which
varies per hotel. A superficial assessment of TripAdvisor shows that hotels receive
between 50 and 500 reviews per year, so an annual survey seems manageable for
most.
In addition to its usefulness to managers, the proposed methodology provides
academic researchers with a new way to assess how consumers prioritize different
dimensions of service quality in online reviews, and offers the opportunity to
identify differences based on for example geographical location or price category.
A number of limitations need to be acknowledged. Although the results pre-
sented in this paper are promising, the method will need to be applied and tested a
number of times in different settings to show how robust it is and to learn how the
information that it offers can be used to guide strategic planning. Although the
378 E. Boon et al.

standardized word lists and automated word frequency counts make the method
reliable, future research should address possible validity concerns. Additionally,
the proposed methodology used keywords to categorize comments into dimen-
sions, but made no distinction between positive and negative words (e.g. ‘clean’
vs. ‘dirty’). We suggest that the reviewer’s rating (from one to five) allows us to
assess whether the experience was positive or negative, but it is possible that
refinement of the methodology will be necessary in the near future.
Future research could address a number of these shortcomings, for example by
evaluating validity in different contexts (e.g. city vs. resort, business vs. tourism),
or comparing results with those of service quality surveys. The methodology offers
a range of potential applications, for example by looking at particular regions or
hotel types. Finally, variants for this methodology could be developed for different
industries, such as restaurants and other service providers.
Nevertheless, the method seems to offer researchers and hotel managers an
efficient new tool. Although it should not replace regular service quality surveys,
this method can be used in tandem. The analysis is fast and easy to carry out, and
may offer hotel managers who don’t have the budget or knowledge to perform a
survey an alternative approach.

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