Managing the Smiley Face Scale Used by Booking.com in an Ordinal Way

User reviews are a new source of information in the hospitality and tourism sector. Usually, these reviews contain comments of users and assessments expressed through ordered qualitative scales. The website Booking.com uses a smiley face scale to ask users the degree of satisfaction regarding severa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of theoretical and applied electronic commerce research 2021-05, Vol.16 (2), p.128-139
Main Authors: del Pozo, Raquel González, García-Lapresta, José Luis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
BUSINESS
Codification
COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Customer satisfaction
Decision making
Electronic commerce
Information sources
Linguistics
Subjective assessment
Tourism
User satisfaction
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Summary:User reviews are a new source of information in the hospitality and tourism sector. Usually, these reviews contain comments of users and assessments expressed through ordered qualitative scales. The website Booking.com uses a smiley face scale to ask users the degree of satisfaction regarding several aspects of accommodations. The scoring system of the website assigns numerical values to each item of the smiley face scale. However, when users perceive different proximities between pairs of items of an ordered qualitative scale, these numerical codifications are because they may misrepresent the original ordinal information. In this paper, we analyze the drawbacks and limitations of the scoring system of Booking.com and we manage its smiley face scale through a purely ordinal procedure. This procedure avoids assigning numerical codifications to items of scales and it takes into account how users perceive the proximities between pairs of items. The findings show the importance of considering how users understand qualitative scales when they face subjective assessments through ordered qualitative scales.
ISSN:0718-1876
0718-1876
DOI:10.4067/S0718-18762021000200109