Revealing Customer Satisfaction With Hotels Through Multi-Site Online Reviews: A Method Based on the Evidence Theory

Hotel managers can learn about hotel customer satisfaction by analyzing online reviews. There are differences in the experience of reviewers, the release time and the degree of recognition for different online reviews, which leads to different reliability in reflecting customer satisfaction. The iss...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2020, Vol.8, p.225226-225239
Main Authors: Li, Mingyang, Ma, Yumei, Cao, Pingping
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Customer satisfaction
Dempster-Shafer evidence theory
Expected utility
hotel
Hotels
Hotels & motels
Linguistics
Mathematical analysis
Measurement methods
online reviews
Reliability
Reliability theory
Self-organizing feature maps
Sentiment analysis
Social sciences
the entropy weight method
Websites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Hotel managers can learn about hotel customer satisfaction by analyzing online reviews. There are differences in the experience of reviewers, the release time and the degree of recognition for different online reviews, which leads to different reliability in reflecting customer satisfaction. The issue of how to determine hotel customer satisfaction more rationally with this reliability in mind is still a problem. To address this problem, this paper proposes a method for measuring hotel customer satisfaction based on the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory, which considers the reliability of online reviews and information from multiple online travel review websites. This method is composed of three stages. First, considering the difference in online reviews' reliability, the basic probability assignment is generated based on online reviews. Next, the aggregation of the evaluation information is conducted based on the entropy weight method and Dempster's rule of combination. Finally, the utility function is used to calculate the expected utility, and customer satisfaction is analyzed based on the calculated expected utility. Therefore, improvement strategies of customer satisfaction can be developed according to customer satisfaction ranking. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of this method, a case study for four hotels is presented. The proposed method is expected to help hotel managers understand the hotel's customer satisfaction, and develop corresponding improvement strategies to enhance its competitiveness.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3044252