Has COVID-19 Changed Consumers’ Satisfiers and Dissatisfiers? Evidence from Online Reviews of 5-Star Hotels in Shanghai and Beijing

ABSTRACT

Many studies have analyzed the asymmetric relationship between hotel service quality attributes and satisfaction, and tried to find consumers’ satisfiers and dissatisfiers, aiming at enhancing satisfaction more efficiently. However, the impact of COVID-19 has led to changes in consumers’ expectations for hotel services, and the above findings might face invalidation. To date, we are still unknown whether consumers’ satisfiers/dissatisfiers changed. This study fills this research gap by mining online reviews of five-star hotels from Shanghai and Beijing before and during the pandemic. The results found that the asymmetric categories of Sleep quality and Internet/Wi-Fi attributes have changed. Specifically, Sleep quality and Internet/Wi-Fi became dissatisfiers from hybrids, indicating that hoteliers only need to maintain their normal performance, and do not invest too many resources because they bring no satisfaction; attributes like Room, decoration, etc. remain hybrids. Additionally, we performed opinion extraction for the dissatisfier attributes to further understand what causes consumer dissatisfaction. The results contribute to the literature by shedding light on the pandemic’s impacts on the asymmetric effects of service quality attributes. The cause analysis can help hoteliers develop specific measures to mitigate the adverse effects of COVID-19.

COVID-19改变了导致消费者满意和不满意的因素吗?来自上海和北京的五星级酒店在线评论的证据摘要

许多研究都分析了酒店服务质量属性和满意度之间的不对称关系,并试图找到导致消费者满意和不满意的因素,旨在更有效地提高满意度。然而,在COVID-19的影响下,消费者对酒店服务的期望值发生了变化,上述结论可能面临失效。到目前为止,我们仍然不知道导致消费者满意/不满意因素是否发生了变化。本研究通过挖掘大流行前和大流行期间上海和北京的五星级酒店的在线评论,填补了这一研究空白。研究结果发现,睡眠质量和互联网/Wi-Fi属性的不对称类别发生了变化。具体来说,睡眠质量和互联网/Wi-Fi从混合型变成了不满意型,表明酒店经营者只需要维持他们的正常表现,而不需要投入太多资源,因为它们不会带来满意;房间、装修等属性仍然是混合型的。此外,我们对不满意的属性进行了意见提取,以进一步了解导致消费者不满意的原因。研究结果通过揭示大流行病对服务质量属性的不对称效应的影响,对相关研究做出了贡献。原因分析可以帮助酒店经营者制定具体措施来减轻COVID-19的不利影响。

关键词:

• COVID-19
• 酒店在线评论
• 服务质量属性
• 满意因素/不满意因素
• 非对称效应

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• hotel online reviews
• service quality attributes
• satisfier/dissatisfier
• asymmetric effects

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Center for Big Data & Intelligent Decision-Making of Dalian University of Technology for providing computing resources. Jie Wu would like to thank China Scholarship Council for its scholarship support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Declaration statement

There is no conflict of interest in the manuscript which is approved by all authors for publication. We would like to declare that all or part of the work described in the manuscript is original research, which has not been published elsewhere and is not prepared for publication elsewhere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jie Wu

Jie Wu is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Economics and Management at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China. Currently, he also works as a research assistant at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China. His research interest includes hospitality marketing and text data mining (E-mail: [email protected]).

Tong Yang

Tong Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Economics and Management at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China. His research interest includes social media data mining, sentiment analysis and tourist satisfaction analysis (E-mail: [email protected]).