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The purpose of this study is to develop a review rating prediction method based on a supervised text mining approach for unrated customer reviews.

Using 2,851 hotel comment card (HCC) reviews, this paper manually labeled positive and negative comments with seven aspects (dining, cleanliness, service, entertainment, price, public, room) that emerged from the content of said reviews. After text preprocessing (tokenization, eliminating punctuation, stemming, etc.), two classifier models were created for predicting the reviews’ sentiments and aspects. Thus, an aggregate rating scale was generated using these two classifier models to determine overall rating values.

A new algorithm, Comment Rate (CRate), based on supervised learning, is proposed. The results are compared with another review-rating algorithm called location based social matrix factorization (LBSMF) to check the consistency of the proposed algorithm. It is seen that the proposed algorithm can predict the sentiments better than LBSMF. The performance evaluation is performed on a real data set, and the results indicate that the CRate algorithm truly predicts the overall rating with ratio 80.27%. In addition, the CRate algorithm can generate an overall rating prediction scale for hotel management to automatically analyze customer reviews and understand the sentiment thereof.

The review data were only collected from a resort hotel during a limited period. Therefore, this paper cannot explore the effect of independent variables on the dependent variable in context of larger period.

This paper provides a novel overall rating prediction technique allowing hotel management to improve their operations. With this feature, hotel management can evaluate guest feedback through HCCs more effectively and quickly. In this way, the hotel management will be able to identify those service areas that need to be developed faster and more effectively. In addition, this review rating prediction approach can be applied to customer reviews posted via online platforms for detecting review and rating reliability.

Manually analyzing textual information is time-consuming and can lead to measurement errors. Therefore, the primary contribution of this study is that although comment cards do not have rating values, the proposed CRate algorithm can predict the overall rating and understand the sentiment of the reviews in question.

This paper reviews the literature on hotel guest questionnaires, also commonly known in the industry as comment cards. Considered a hotel tradition, the ubiquitous questionnaire remains the primary method employed by mainstream hotels to elicit and record guest feedback despite shortcomings in data reliability and response rates. Hence questionnaires play a key facilitation role in the collection of guest feedback (guest–hotel dyad in hotel communication). The paper traces the history of questionnaire utilization in the hotel industry, and examines evolutionary changes in terms of form and function. A typology of questionnaire genre is constructed. Used either independently or in combination with other methods, the traditional paper guest questionnaire has been complemented or even superseded by e-based variants. Obsolescence threatens the paper questionnaire as technology uptake permeates the hotel industry. This paper considers a “service innovation” by using the questionnaire as a communication tool along the hotel–guest dyad. A back-to-basics approach potentially yields a valuable and cost-efficient guest service encounter opportunity whilst mitigating questionnaire data deficiencies.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how hotels are implementing customer relationship management (CRM) practices at the property level.

Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 45 hotel managers from 17 hotels. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using content analysis.

All participating hotels have practices in place to manage customer relationships. The most commonly cited goal for CRM is guest retention. Evaluation and control are perceived as very important activities not only to create value for the customers, but also to track the performance of the guest contact departments and the customers' evaluations of the hotel/restaurant experiences.

The sample is probably biased towards hotels that are most interested in CRM and are heavily weighted towards higher tariff properties.

The study modified Buttle's CRM value chain to analyze hotels' CRM practices. Results of the study provide a source for industry practitioners to compare and benchmark their practices and to obtain useful CRM ideas.

CRM‐related research in the hotel industry has looked at a variety of specific practices and its role in achieving overall objectives at the corporate strategic level. Yet, no research has been done to investigate CRM practices at the property level for hotels using the CRM value chain.

The use of comment cards is a very popular method for obtaining customer feedback in the hospitality industry. An investigation was made regarding the current status of comment card usage in hotel‐restaurants offering high quality, Sunday champagne buffets, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Cards were assessed with regard to frequency and mode of availability, information content, service quality, card design, and management follow‐up. Although 81 per cent of the buffets made use of comment cards, problems were found with accessibility, comprehensiveness of information, questionnaire design principles and frequency of call‐backs.

The relationship between customer loyalty and satisfaction, profitability and customer retention is described within the framework of relationship marketing. The importance of loyal customers and their impact on business profitability is undisputed, but it is more difficult to build customer retention than it may appear. Various strategies including loyalty schemes and discount cards are sometimes used in an effort to retain customers, but their success is questionable. A New Zealand hotel case study is presented which describes customer reactions to a discount card promotion. It was found that customers who purchased the card exhibited the characteristics of Morgan’s “mercenaries”. Although they had high satisfaction, their commitment to the company was low. However, in order to succeed, loyalty programmes need to develop “loyalists”, customers who have high satisfaction, high loyalty and who will stay and be supportive of the company.

This paper examines conceptual links between facilities and hospitality management in the context of customer satisfaction. In both areas, there has thus far been a lack of theorising about the subject‐matter which might legitimately be encompassed within subject boundaries. By focusing on the single area of customer satisfaction an attempt is made to show how this process might proceed, albeit in a narrowly focused manner. The paper examines “hard” and “soft” dimensions to facilities management in hotels by means of an investigative probe into the nature of customer complaints in hotels. No claims are made for the generalisability of findings, rather it is the intention to show how, in the application of facilities management concerns, it is possible to engage in conceptual development and empirical study.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the main barriers and key issues that the hotel industry professionals face during the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliance process. This paper will help to understand weaknesses and gaps in the PCI compliance process within the hotel industry that will provide a foundation to develop strategies and methods to address those issues in the future.

The paper presents an exploratory study using a two‐stage design. The first stage of the study was designed utilizing the Delphi technique to identify the issues that take place in the PCI compliance process in hotels. After analyzing the results of the first stage of the study, a list of PCI issues was compiled and incorporated in the web hosted questionnaire. In total, 30 hotel executives participated in the second stage of the study providing their evaluation of the importance of the identified PCI compliance issues.

A list of 20 PCI compliance issues that hotel executives face during the process was compiled as an outcome of the first stage of the study. The second stage of the study showed high‐financial cost of implementing and maintaining, lack of qualified staff, inadequate staff training, ambiguous terms in PCI DSS language, and lack of vendors' support and compliance to be the top five issues in PCI compliance in hotels.

The paper provides a useful insight into the issues that take place in the hotel industry during the PCI compliance process. This field has not been studied well in the literature. This paper presents the problems in PCI compliance that need to be addressed in order to make the process more efficient and effective.

This chapter highlights key experiences in using leading examples of tourism-linked technology during travel. Managerial directions are offered to hospitality and tourism businesses when employing contemporary technology applications. A carefully crafted autoethnographic approach, supported by netnography, provides the basis for the findings and recommendations. Two settings were chosen as iconic cases: exploring the city of Innsbruck and staying in a high-tech hotel in Vienna. The insights revealed that while technology provides advantages for tourists’ stays, less than thoughtful use can also disturb the experiences. The contribution to tourism intelligence from this study lies in the need for technology applications to create well tested, personalized and user-friendly services for diverse tourists and to design a communication system to anticipate problems.

The purpose of this study is to delineate the role of wine at hotels from the customer’s perspective by analyzing New York City hotel reviews posted on TripAdvisor.

This study used content analysis to study 26,831 wine-relevant reviews that had been posted on TripAdvisor’s New York City hotels by April 12, 2018. Two trained coders quantified and tallied the presence of themes based on the pre-established coding scheme.

Wine was mentioned in the online reviews in expressing positive, negative or neutral hotel experiences. Of the 877,616 New York City hotel reviews, about 3 per cent contained the keyword “wine.” The three most frequently mentioned wine-related positive experiences were free happy hours, a surprise bottle of complimentary wine and the fun of pairing food and wine. The top three wine-related negative experiences were pricey/expensive/overpriced wine, poor wine list and poor quality of wine. The study found that hotel guests liked wine and that it had become a significant aspect of their lodging experience.

This study adds value to the literature of hotel wines by divulging hotel customers’ wine-related experiences through their online comments and by providing a snapshot of hotel guests’ wine-drinking behavior. The findings can provide an insight for hotels to further the use of wine as a means to enhance guest experience and to generate additional revenue.

The purposes of this study are to identify how hotel guests perceive green practices and to explore how hotels effectively inform customers of their green practices through social media such as TripAdvisor.

To examine hotel guests’ awareness of green practices through social media, this research investigated guests’ comments about green practices and management responses on TripAdvisor using content analysis.

The results indicated that most guests respond positively toward green practices when they can recognize them, e.g. reducing energy usage or water saving. However, lack of awareness about hotels’ green practices can cause guests to feel inconvenienced during their stays. Moreover, the study found that only a few hotel managements provide feedback on guests’ negative comments on TripAdvisor to inform them about the hotels’ green practices.

This research is limited to analyzing only the top ten green hotels in the USA ranked by TripAdvisor. A study of more hotel cases with green practice standards, which could be adjusted to involve the use of different service levels such as luxury, upscale or economy hotels, may provide more insights into this discussion.

This research presents an exploratory intent to probe guests’ comments and management responses about green practices in the US lodging industry. The results provide empirical evidence of hotel guests’ perceptions of green practices as posted on social media. Moreover, management can use social media feedback as an educational tool and as effective advertisement, which in turn may reduce the negative perception of hotel green programs.