Understanding online hotel popularity through empirical approach

Digitization around the world has led to advancement in every field. The hospitality and tourism sector has also seen an upsurge in technology with the boom of the internet. It is a data-abundant field where the addition of data happens in the form of numerical ratings and textual reviews. Many consumers write online reviews which impact the product and services. The hotel industry is an integral part of the tourism sector as it is the main product that a consumer experiences. Thus, a hotel-related study is very important. Perception of a hotel by the customer impacts its popularity among the masses. In this paper, we use customer-provided feedback on Online Travel Agencies to understand what factors impact the popularity of the hotel. A dataset from TripAdvisor.com is used for evaluation purposes. This study utilizes various aspect ratings and several electronic word-of-mouth features. Further, review recency is used as a moderating variable to understand how it manipulates the impact of other variables. For analysis, econometric modeling is done and the obtained results are discussed in detail. The findings of this paper provide hoteliers with some interesting insights which are useful for them to improve the popularity of their hotels. This study is summarized with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications.