EMPIRICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH TO IDENTIFY CLUSTERS OF CHARACTERISTICS THAT UNDERLIE THE ONLINE EVALUATION OF ACCOMMODATION SERVICES
EMPIRICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH TO IDENTIFY CLUSTERS OF CHARACTERISTICS THAT UNDERLIE THE ONLINE EVALUATION OF ACCOMMODATION SERVICES

Summary/Abstract: In tourism, online reviews are tools for researching the perceptions of the tourists. The evaluation that all review websites do (Booking.com, TripAdvisor. com, Expedia.com, etc.) involves making an average between the grades of 5, 6 or 7 features, each having an equally weighted average. It is likely that the average obtained does not reflect actual consumer satisfaction, because for every individual, the characteristics have different importance weights and may even vary in content from one individual to another or from one situation to another. The analysis of the reviews associated to the assessments would be revealing but it is difficult to do, give their descriptive nature and the high number. The purpose of this paper is to find a method which allows the identification of the characteristics of hotels’ offer, from the reviews posted online, which are of interest to consumers. This paper proposes a method capable of operating with a large amount of descriptive data (15,200 reviews), complex neural networks, and to identify clusters of characteristics of hotels’ offer, useful for configuring and improving the offer. The method is tested through an empirical sociological research on all the reviews posted at a time by the AmFostAcolo Romanian website.

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