Perceptual mapping of hotel brands using online reviews: a text analytics approach

Product perceptual mapping in the lodging industry has largely relied on survey and focus group methods to represent consumer perceptions of how the hotel product compares to one another. The more recent availability of online reviews represents a potentially powerful source of data that can be used to provide insights into how brands are perceived. This study uses a text analysis approach to create perceptual maps from the most frequent terms used in a data set collected from an online travel agency. These maps show not only the ability for text analytics to produce insights on brands, but also their potential for understanding how brands are able to be differentiated in the minds of consumers. The findings indicate that consumers perceive brands to be positioned similar to the structure defined by the industry. Brands were shown to be associated with terms indicative of the class of hotel that formed the majority of the brand. This suggests that online consumer reviews can be used to represent the level of differentiation between hotel brands and thus, are a useful source for understanding the market structure of the hotel industry. Implications for both research and practice are also discussed. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.