Travellers segmentation and choice prediction through online reviews: the case of Wellingtons Hotels in New Zealand

Abstract

Customer choice and segmentation through online reviews can help hotels to improve their marketing strategy development. Nevertheless, old-style approaches are unproductive in analysing online data generated by customers because of size, dissimilar proportions and structures of online review data. Therefore, this research aims to develop a method for 5-star hotels segmentation and travellers’ choice forecast through online reviews analysis using machine learning methods. Assessment of method was directed through the gathering of data from travellers’ ratings of Wellington’s 5-star hotels on different features in TripAdvisor. Results confirm that the projected hybrid machine learning approaches can be applied as a progressive recommender mediator for 5-star hotel segmentation by applying ‘big data’ obtained from online social media settings.