What Makes User-Generated Content about Luxury Hotels Useful? From the Content Concreteness Perspective

Abstract

With the popularization and growth of social media, the exchange of opinions on online platforms has become more and more enriching. This has gradually evolved into user-generated content (UGC). Due to the unpredictable and experiential nature of hotel services, e-Word of Mouth (WOM) of hotels is becoming increasingly significant for hotel revenue, brand image and customer feedback. User-generated online comments have a greater impact on luxury hotels than on other ordinary hotels because consumers of luxury hotels have to recognize the value of the hotel's luxury image and services before they will pay expensive fees. User-generated content can help luxury hotels to build up their brand image and excellent service reputation, and reduce consumers' uncertainty before booking. Based on the significance of user-generated content for luxury hotels and the tourism industry, as well as the benchmarking role of luxury hotels in the industry, we need to understand what factors make UGC relevant for luxury hotels useful.
Focusing on the concreteness of online comments and text keywords, this paper first analyzes the correlation between text length, number of images, information richness, and usefulness using Tobit regression, and then divides the UGC in the sample into two categories of high usefulness and low usefulness using K-means clustering. Then by text mining, we analyzed how the high-frequency words in the high usefulness posts and low usefulness posts are different, and we analyzed the difference between the occurrence of the same kind of words in the high usefulness posts and low usefulness posts.
The findings of this paper show that there are significant differences in the high frequency words of high and low usefulness comments. And luxury characteristics, room view and photo related keywords appeared more often in the high usefulness comments. Keywords describing the decoration and design in detail, and mentioning the hotel booker, price and promotion appeared more often in low usefulness posts.

Date of Award	Feb 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	School of Hotel and Tourism Management