Systematic Literature Review on the Profile of Tourists in Four- and Five-star Hotels Based on Online Reviews

Considering the articles selected for this study, three journals stand out as they represent 41% of the total publications (Table 3). Taking into account the Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management category of Scimago Journal & Country Rank, the International Journal of Hospitality Management, Tourism Manage-ment and International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management are ranked 5th, 1st and 7th, respec-tively, in the year 2021.

More than half of the articles were published in the last five years, with 2020 showing the highest number of publications (Figure 2). From 2013, the year of the oldest publication, to 2022, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of studies that included the extraction and analysis of online reviews written by tourists in the hospitality sector.

Figure 2:

Number of articles by year of publication

Source: Own work

Most of the articles collected online reviews from hotels located in the United States of America, followed by hotels located in China and Portugal. It is important to note that, in one study, the authors selected hotels located in 20 tourist destinations evenly distributed across four geographic regions – the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Middle East/Africa (Banerjee & Chua, 2016), while, in another article, hotels from four countries in the same regions mentioned above were considered (Francesco & Roberta, 2019), and a further study covered hotels located in two European countries and one Eurasian country (Mariani et al., 2020).

In 27 studies, data were extracted from TripAdvisor (Figure 3), the largest online hotel review platform in the world and widely investigated by the academic community (Banerjee & Chua, 2016; Hu et al., 2019), and in 11 investigations the Booking.com platform was selected, and it was indicated as a suitable source to ensure the authenticity of the extracted data, since only customers who book through Booking.com can publish reviews after their stay (Xu et al., 2017).

Figure 3:

Number of studies by booking and opinion platform used

Source: Own work

It is worth mentioning that, in two articles, TripAdvisor and Booking.com were used simultaneously, confirming the possibility of combining online reviews from various sources, possessing different textual components and rating scales (Antonio et al., 2018; Phillips et al., 2020). On the other hand, the TripAdvisor platform was used in conjunction with the Ctrip platform in two studies (Alemán Carreón et al., 2021; Liang et al., 2017). Finally, two articles selected the Agoda platform (Wu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2014) and one investigation chose the Daodao platform for data collection (Li et al., 2013). Thus, Figure 3 presents a total number of results higher than the number of selected articles.

In the majority of the studies, online reviews from more than ten hotels were collected (Figure 4), with three investigations standing out for having collected data from over 10,000 hotel units (Li et al., 2020a; Liu et al., 2017; Radojevic et al., 2018). Conversely, four articles stood out for including data from less than ten hotels (Padma & Ahn, 2020; Sann & Lai, 2021; Tsiotsou, 2019). Regarding the number of online reviews, it can be noted that all studies analysed more than 500 reviews; however, one study stands out for investigating nearly 5,000,000 online reviews (Radojevic et al., 2018).

Figure 4:

Number of hotels and number of online reviews per article

Source: Own work

Investigating user preferences and behavioural patterns through online reviews available on booking and opinion platforms, such as Booking.com and TripAdvisor, is a valuable source of information for the hotel industry, and can assist managers in their decision-making and hotel performance, as well as in obtaining knowledge about customers (Ahani et al., 2019; Berezina et al., 2016).

Certain authors have valued the personal data of users who write online reviews, and several studies have been conducted that contribute to obtaining knowledge about customers in the hotel industry. Examples are the investigations of Moro et al. (2022), Tsiotsou (2019, 2022), Wu et al. (2017) and Zhou et al. (2014), in which the country of origin of users was analysed to establish behavioural patterns related to travellers' cultural differences and their predisposition to express satisfaction regarding their hotel experiences, revealing that satisfaction varies according to the country of origin of the users.

Based on the analysis of online reviews of four- and five-star hotels located in Hangzhou, China, Zhou et al. (2014) drew conclusions about the satisfaction of customers from five market origins. Thus, the authors identified that tourists from Oceania were the most satisfied, followed by Chinese and American tourists, and the markets of Western Europe and Southeast Asia were the least satisfied. In addition, it was recognised that the public areas (lounge, lobby, pool and fitness centre) were the attributes that contributed most to customer satisfaction, while their dissatisfaction was related to aspects associated with the physical environment of the rooms (size and cleanliness) and the hotel (dated quality of facilities and noise level), as well as the value for money (room price), the location (close to attractions and accessibility with public transport) and the staff (language skills and efficiency in solving problems). The advice to hotel managers was that they should improve the aspects identified as negative for guest satisfaction.

Later, the results of the Zhou et al. (2014) study were partially corroborated by the findings of Wu et al. (2017), who discovered, when analysing online reviews of five-star hotels in Shanghai, China, that tourists from Oceania and North America were the most satisfied and that staff and service were the attributes that contributed the most to this feeling. In contrast, Japanese and Korean tourists were the least satisfied, and their concerns were primarily related to tangible aspects of the hotels. In this respect, the authors emphasise the importance of staff delivering high-quality service to their customers.

Alternatively, Tsiotsou (2019) studied the differences in the evaluation of European guests by exploring online reviews of four- and five-star hotels in Greece, and concluded that the ranking by tourists descends in the order of Northern, Eastern, Western, and Southern Europeans, that is, Northern Europeans were the most generous in evaluating hotels, while Southern Europeans were the least generous. In this respect, Tsiotsou (2019) suggests that hoteliers should encourage Northern European guests to leave online reviews, as they were the ones who rated the hotels the best.

Later, when investigating online reviews of five-star hotels in Northern Greece, the same author recognised that Northern Europeans valued the staff, Eastern Europeans appreciated the hotel's physical attributes/environment, Western Europeans focused mainly on basic products, such as the room and food, and Southern Europeans were concerned with services (Tsiotsou, 2022). With this study, the author concluded that guests' cultural differences should be considered when interpreting online reviews, so that hotel managers can tailor their services and develop effective marketing and promotion strategies. The findings of Tsiotsou (2022) corroborate and expand the results of the previous study by Kitsios et al. (2021), which, through the analysis of online reviews of five-star hotels in Thessaloniki, Greece, indicated that factors significantly affecting customer satisfaction are related to location, staff, rooms and services. However, it is important to highlight that, in this study (Kitsios et al., 2021), the country of origin of the online review users was not considered.

In order to understand the influence of culture on tourists' perception of hotel attributes, Moro et al. (2022) analysed online reviews from foreign guests and concluded that, regardless of cultural origin, location and price were the attributes that most and least satisfied customers, respectively, in four- and five-star hotels in New York. These findings partially corroborate the results of a previous study by Kim et al. (2016), who found that location was the attribute that most satisfied customers in four- and five-star hotels in New York. Like the study by Kitsios et al. (2021), the study by Kim et al. (2016) did not consider the country of origin of the users of online reviews.

In addition to analysing the country of origin of users, research has also been conducted examining the language of online reviews to investigate guest evaluation behaviour considering linguistic differences (Alemán Carreón et al., 2021; Antonio et al., 2018; Li et al., 2020a; Liu et al., 2017; Mariani et al., 2019; Pacheco, 2016; Schuckert et al., 2015). The results indicate that customer satisfaction varies depending on the language in which the online reviews are written. Most studies have focused on four-and five-star hotels.

In order to compare the satisfaction behaviour of English and non-English-speaking guests, Schuckert et al. (2015) analysed the language of online reviews written by hotel customers in Hong Kong, China, and found that customers who wrote in English were the most satisfied and the most likely to stay in four- and five-star hotels. In contrast, guests who did not write online reviews in English were less satisfied with four- and five-star hotels because they had high expectations, while guests who wrote in English enjoyed their stay without being very demanding.

Expanding on the Schuckert et al. (2015) research, Pacheco (2016) investigated the distribution and diffe-rence in classification behaviour of hotel guests in Porto, Portugal, based on the language of online reviews written in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese. The author found that guests who wrote in Brazilian Portuguese were the ones who gave the highest ratings to four- and five-star hotels, while guests who wrote in Spanish and French gave the lowest ratings. Later, in another study, the same author revealed that room and service were the predictor attributes of guest satisfaction in four- and five-star hotels in Portugal, based on the analysis of online reviews written by hotel customers located in Lisbon, Algarve, Porto and Madeira Island (Pacheco, 2017). In this study the language of the online reviews was not considered.

In another approach, Liu et al. (2017) emphasised the importance of segmenting customers based on hotel categories, by comparing the satisfaction of domestic and international tourists through the language of online reviews from hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Sanya, China. Thus, it was possible to ascertain that most guests who wrote in international languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian), as well as in Chinese (domestic customers), rated five-star hotels positively. However, several four-star hotels were highly rated by guests writing in international languages but received a lower score from domestic customers.

Extending the results of studies by Schuckert et al. (2015), Pacheco (2016), Liu et al. (2017), and Antonio et al. (2018) examined online comments written in English, Spanish and Portuguese, in combination with hotel sales data in Portugal, and revealed that four- and five-star hotels obtained higher ratings in reviews written in English in comparison to reviews written in Spanish and Portuguese. Furthermore, the authors found that customers who wrote reviews in Portuguese and Spanish opted to share online reviews on the Booking.com plat-form and the majority of guests who commented in English chose the TripAdvisor platform, highlighting the importance of research being developed through more than one data source.

In another study, having analysed online reviews from Italian, American and Chinese travellers staying in hotels located in Hong Kong, London, New York and Dubai, Francesco & Roberta (2019) found that people from different countries perceive and emphasise hotel attributes differently. Thus, they observed that the attribute most emphasised by Italian tourists in four- and five-star hotels was location, and American and Chinese clients highlighted cleanliness and service attitude, respectively, in five-star hotels. The results of this study may help hotel managers determine the optimal allocation of scarce financial resources, considering customer satisfaction criteria (Francesco & Roberta, 2019). For this analysis, the authors considered not only the language in which the online reviews were written (English, Chinese and Italian), but also the users' country of origin (USA, China and Italy), a method also used by other authors in their research (Gunasekar et al., 2021; Mariani et al., 2020; Oliveira et al., 2022; Phillips et al., 2020; Sann & Lai, 2021).

In recent years, several studies have been developed examining customer preferences through online reviews, and it has been proven that guests show higher satisfaction levels in four- and five-star hotels (Ahn et al., 2017; Li et al., 2020a; Li et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2017; Pacheco, 2016, 2017; Phillips et al., 2020; Tsiotsou, 2019; Uslu Cibere et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2014). However, after examining online reviews of hotels located in the top 100 cities in the United States, these results were not verified in the study by Xu et al. (2017), as it was found that guests in four- and five-star hotels showed less satisfaction with hotel attributes and services compared to customers staying in lower categories. The authors justify this by the fact that guests have higher expectations regarding products and services in higher category hotels, since the cost is higher. The previous study by Li et al. (2013) also addressed this issue, as it was found, when investigating online reviews of hotels located in Beijing, China, that some factors that guests consider important when booking four- and five-star hotels, such as the bed, the room and reception services, did not meet their expectations.

Later, the investigation by Padma & Ahn (2020) confirmed the conclusions of Xu et al. (2017) by verifying that guests in five-star hotels have much higher expectations compared to those staying in lower-rated hotels, based on the investigation of online hotel reviews in Malaysia. Therefore, the study by Li et al. (2020a) may clarify this fact by finding, through the analysis of online reviews of hotels located in Sanya, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hangzhou in China, that the cleanliness, location, room, service and value are basic factors for customer satisfaction in four- and five-star hotels, and if the performance of these attributes falls short of guests' expectations, they will be dissatisfied.

Customer dissatisfaction can lead to complaints, and there is evidence that online complaint behaviour is influenced by hotel category (Fernandes & Fernandes, 2018; Hu et al., 2019; Sann et al., 2020). Fernandes & Fernandes (2018) analysed online reviews with negative statements regarding hotels located in Porto, Portugal, and found that guests in four- and five-star hotels expressed greater dissatisfaction with the service, particularly customer care, location, and value. Service and value were also the factors with the most complaints made by customers in four- and five-star hotels in the investigations by Hu et al. (2019) and Sann et al. (2020), based on the examination of reviews of hotels in New York and the United Kingdom, respectively. In this respect, the authors suggested hoteliers should ensure that the high-quality standards expected by customers are provided, or even exceeded (Fernandes & Fernandes, 2018), and that the space for shortfalls that cause dissatisfaction be reduced (Sann et al., 2020). In addition, through the analysis of online reviews, hoteliers have an excellent opportunity to understand the causes of guest dissatisfaction, allowing the re-evaluation of strategies and the direction of limited financial resources towards improving negative factors (Fernandes & Fernandes, 2018).

Furthermore, through the analysis of online reviews, it is possible to know if the tourist travelled alone, as a couple, with family, friends or for business. It has been proven that, when placed in different group compositions, travelers present dissimilar expectations and preferences towards hotel attributes and services, and that the determinants and levels of guest satisfaction, as well as their rating patterns, depend on who they are traveling with (Ahn et al., 2017; Banerjee & Chua, 2016; Liu et al., 2013; Xu, 2018; Yadav & Roychoudhury, 2019). The studies by Ahani et al. (2019) and Tsiotsou (2019) confirmed these findings, as it was identified, based on the analysis of online reviews of hotels located in the Canary Islands (Spain) and Greece, respectively, that guests who travelled with family and as a couple were those who expressed greater satisfaction in four- and five-star hotels.

On the other hand, there is evidence that guests traveling for business report lower levels of satisfaction than those travelling for leisure (Banerjee & Chua, 2016; Kim et al., 2022; Liang et al., 2017; Radojevic et al., 2018). These findings were also confirmed in four- and five-star hotels, according to the studies by Wu et al. (2017) and Ahn et al. (2017), as it was verified, based on the observation of online reviews of hotels located in Shanghai and New York, respectively, that business travellers presented lower satisfaction compared to other travellers. Wu et al. (2017) found that guests travelling for business presented specific concerns related to business-oriented services and recommended that, to increase the satisfaction of these customers, hoteliers should inform guests at check-in about all the business facilities and services offered by the hotels. Table 4 summarises the above studies.

Due to its open structure, the analysis of consumer-generated content provides the opportunity to produce more accurate reports on customer experiences compared to traditional research methods such as interviews (Kitsios et al., 2021). In this respect, hoteliers should be aware of how this content can add value to their businesses and how it can be used to improve performance and business success (Kitsios et al., 2021). Through the key management implications provided by the studies considered for this review, it was possible to synthesise the benefits of hoteliers knowing their customers through online review analysis, as presented in Figure 5.

Figure 5:

Benefits of hoteliers getting to know their customers by analysing online reviews.

Source: Based on the results of studies by Ahani et al. (2019), Ahn et al. (2017), Antonio et al. (2018), Fernandes & Fernandes (2018), Francesco & Roberta (2019), Hu et al. (2019), Kitsios et al. (2021), Li et al. (2013), Liu et al. (2017), Moro et al. (2022), Padma & Ahn (2020), Sann et al. (2020), Schuckert et al. (2015), Tsiotsou (2019, 2022), Xu et al. (2017) and Zhou et al. (2014).

Indeed, analysing online reviews allows hoteliers to better understand their customers and benefit from a series of advantages that contribute to improving hotel performance. However, in order for hoteliers to take advantage of the information freely provided by customers, the use of suitable software for collection and analysis becomes indispensable, as well as the allocation of workers to regularly monitor it (Wu et al., 2017).