Research from Apex
Global Learning shows that customer reviews directly impact business
revenue:
Analyzing customer reviews and operational data is crucial for hotel management to gain valuable insights into guest experiences and identify areas for improvement. By leveraging natural language processing techniques to extract sentiment scores and semantic insights from review text, management can quantify and visualize customer satisfaction levels across various aspects of their operations, such as room quality, service, and location.
These analyses enable management to pinpoint strengths and
weaknesses, make data-driven decisions, and prioritize initiatives to
enhance guest experiences and overall operational excellence.
Ultimately, harnessing the wealth of information contained within
customer feedback and operational data empowers hotel management to
deliver superior hospitality services and foster guest loyalty, thereby
driving long-term success and profitability.
The data analyzed in this report was extracted from Google Reviews provided by guest of a random resort hotel located on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The reviews all had written comments and provided an overall rating between 1 and 5 stars. Most, but not all, also included ratings between 1 and 5 stars of the rooms, service, and location of the hotel.
A small sample of the analysis that can be derived from guest reviews
is offered below.
To gain an overview of the distribution of customer ratings, a column
chart can be utilized to visualize the count of reviews across each star
rating category, from 1 star (lowest) to 5 stars (highest). This chart
provides a clear representation of the hotel’s performance, allowing
management to quickly identify the proportion of positive (4-5 star) and
negative (1-2 star) reviews, as well as the overall rating
tendencies.
While the distribution of star ratings offers a broad overview,
analyzing the mean ratings across specific operational areas provides
more granular insights. A bar chart visualizing the average ratings for
overall experience, rooms, service, and location enables hotel
management to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses within each facet of
their operations.
Of note for this resort, the mean rating for overall satisfaction is
less than the ratings for rooms, service, and location. That may be a
sampling issue, as some reviews only included an overall star rating,
but there may be other factors besides rooms, service, and location that
adversely impact the guests’ overall experience at the resort.
Certainly, it warrants further exploration.
To complement the quantitative star ratings, analyzing the sentiment
expressed in textual reviews offers a nuanced perspective on guest
experiences. A boxplot showcasing the median sentiment scores across the
1 to 5 star rating categories provides valuable qualitative insights.
This visualization enables hotel management to assess the alignment
between numerical ratings and the emotional tenor of guest feedback,
identifying potential disconnects and opportunities to address
underlying issues or reinforce positive aspects of the customer
journey.
Sentiment analysis cannot perfectly capture the sentiments of the
text, and in this chart, it is worth noting that each category has
outlier values. For the “one star” ratings, there are a number of
strongly positive outlier sentiments. These might be missclassified
sentiments (e.g. “the rooms were not very clean” being classified as
“very clean”), or they might reflect certain aspects of the hotel that
guests valued highly, even if the overall experience was rated poorly.
Deeper examination of the reviews would clarify the apparent
discrepancies.
Visualizing the most frequently used words in guest reviews through word clouds can offer a powerful and intuitive representation of the prominent themes and sentiments expressed. By generating separate word clouds for positive and negative reviews, hotel management can quickly identify the key drivers of guest satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Five Star Word Cloud
One Star Word Cloud
It is apparent from these two word clouds that guests’ perceptions of
the resort’s operations can vary significantly. Understanding the
context of the disparate assessments may illuminate aspects of the
operations that may have uneven quality across time.
This preliminary analysis of Google reviews left by guests provides a valuable overview of the positive and negative aspects of the resort’s operations. The management team would want to examine in greater detail the sentiments and perceptions to better understand and identify those areas in which the resort is performing well and those areas in which performance could be improved. Ultimately, the long-term success of the resort will depend largely on the perceptions and assessments of the guests of the resort, and data analysis of guest reviews offers management the opportunity to understand and address the strengths and weaknesses of the resort.