AN ETNOGRAPHY EXAMINATION OF TRIPADVISOR REVIEWS: A CASE STUDY OF THE ST REGIS HOTEL KUALA LUMPUR

There has been a growing reliance on consumer-generated content as a source of knowledge for hospitality product decision-making. People post their views, ratings, and reviews of products and services on such platforms, and companies and research organizations are interested in analyzing and extracting all of the comments. Hotels must take advantage of online customer review information to better understand their customers and enhance hotel efficiency. However, analyzing guest reviews is challenging as it contains abundant data. Using The St Regis Kuala Lumpur as a case study, the objective of the paper is to 1) profile the online hotel reviews using netnography approach, (2) identify the hotel attributes that guests comment on based on the hotel online reviews and (3) examine the guest satisfaction attitude based on the online hotel reviews. A total of 388 reviews ranging from TripAdvisor were collected. The finding revealed that most hotel guests who left comments were international tourists, couples and left an excellent rating for the hotel. The result shows nine attributes are frequently mentioned; amenities, location, price, service, cleanliness, food and beverages, hotel and room environment. The results also show that guests left positive and negative reviews in a few common categories: hotel cleanliness, hotel environment, and amenities. Among all the attributes, satisfied guests tend to leave positive comments in hotel cleanliness, hotel and room setting, while dissatisfied guests emphasise amenities. The findings from this study make several theoretical and managerial implications regarding identifying hotel attributes that generate guest satisfaction and understanding of satisfied and dissatisfied guests using comments left by guest. The paper concludes with limitations and suggests future research.