Smart vs traditional hotels: a sentiment analysis investigation

Purpose
This study aims to investigate the differences in guest sentiments between smart and traditional hotels and to understand the factors that influence these differences.

Design/methodology/approach
Sentiment analysis was conducted on a data set comprising 8,147 reviews collected from TripAdvisor, with 3,664 reviews about smart hotels and 4,483 reviews about traditional hotels from 2016 to 2021. Data extraction was performed using Python with the Selenium package for web scraping.

Findings
The findings revealed no significant differences in guest sentiments between smart and traditional hotels across dimensions, including overall sentiment, cleanliness, value for money, room quality, sleep quality and location. However, traditional hotels received significantly higher sentiment scores in service quality than smart hotels. In addition, a significant positive relationship was found between sentiments towards each dimension and overall sentiments for both smart and traditional hotels.

Originality/value
Although research has investigated guest perceptions of smart and high-tech hotels, there has been no comparative study of perceptions between smart and traditional hotels. This study addresses this gap by using comparative sentiment analysis on online reviews. The findings provide academics and practitioners with essential insights into the performance of smart hotels compared to their traditional counterparts.