Tourism Amidst COVID-19: consumer experience in luxury hotels booked through digital platforms

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought changes in the different requirements related to consumer experience. We conducted a sentiment analysis on many comments of tourists in two most popular online travel platforms in Mexico, TripAdvisor and Booking.com, from April 2020 to February 2021. Our analysis was aimed at understanding the effect of COVID-19 on the behaviour of tourism consumers who make trips using on-line platforms for booking luxury hotels. The results demonstrated that the personal characteristics of travellers are heterogeneous and respond to a specific context. The research concluded that luxury hotels need to create appropriate strategies for the tourists who make booking through digital platforms and the different requirements they have during their stays in the hotels.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19 behaviour patterns
• luxury hotels
• travel consumer experience
• tourist groups
• smart tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Escandon-Barbosa

Diana Escandon-Barbosa, PhD is Associate Professor in Business Organization in the Business Department of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali, Colombia and Senior Researcher at MinCiencias, Colombia. She is author and/or co-author of different books, book chapters or papers in both national and international academic journals such as Frontiers of Psychology, Young consumer, Competitive Review, European Management Journal, Journal of Urban Management, among others. Her research interests include, internationalization of SMEs and international entrepreneurship. Diana also serves as ad-hoc reviewer for different academic journals and developed her Postdoctoral at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

Jairo Salas-Paramo

Jairo Salas-Paramo, PhD is Assistant Professor in Business Organization in the Business Department of Pontifical Javeriana University, Colombia. He is author and/or co-author of different books and papers. His research interests are: Management, Consumer Behavior, Entrepreneurship, and Internationalization of SMEs. Dr. Jairo Salas-Paramo also serves as ad-hoc reviewer for different academic journals and has published in Young Consumers and Journal of Urban Management recently.