The relationship between hotel star rating and website information quality based on visual presentation

• Published in: PloS one 2023-11, Vol.18 (11), p.e0290629-e0290629
• Main Authors: Cheng, Ching-Hsue, Tsai, Ming-Chi, Chang, Yuan-Shao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Biology and Life Sciences; Check lists; Classification; Compensation; Computer and Information Sciences; Consumer organizations; Consumers; Customer services; Data collection; Data mining; Decision making; Embedding; Engineering and Technology; Evaluation; Hotels; Hotels & motels; Hotels and motels; Information management; Information technology; Internet; Iran; Market positioning; Marketing; Marketing research; Physical Sciences; Principal components analysis; Quality management; Quality of service; Ratings & rankings; Research and Analysis Methods; Restaurants; Set theory; Social networks; Social Sciences; Stars; Stochasticity; Taiwan; Tourism; Traffic information; Travel; Travel industry; Web sites; Websites
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0290629

The hotel industry is essential for tourism. With the rapid expansion of the internet, consumers only search for their desired keywords on the website when they trying to find a hotel to stay, causing the relevant hotel information would appear. To quickly respond to the changing market and consumer habits, each hotel must focus on its website information and information quality. This study proposes a novel methodology that uses rough set theory (RST), principal component analysis, t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), and attribute performance visualization to explore the relationship between hotel star ratings and hotel website information quality. The collected data are based on the star-rated hotels of the Taiwanstay website, and the checklists of hotel website services are used to obtain the relevant attributes data. The results show that there are significant differences in information quality between hotels below two stars and those above four stars. The information quality provided by the higher star hotels was more detailed than that offered by low-star hotels. Based on the attribute performance matrix, the one-star and two-star hotels have advantage attributes in their landscape, reply time, restaurant information, social media, and compensation. Furthermore, the three-five star hotels have advantage attributes in their operational support, compensation, restaurant information, traffic information, and room information. These results could be provided to the stakeholders as a reference.