Modelling the Impact of the Hotel Facilities on Online Hotel Review Score for City of Skopje

Abstract

Having a reliable and objective opinion regarding their hotel facilities is very important for hotel managers. In today's internet-connected world where each year millions of travelers book, stay in, and review hotel accommodations, it is very easy to obtain desired information with the right tools. This study utilizes online data generated from thousands of guests' hotel reviews to provide comparative and benchmarking insights about the customer satisfaction through hotel review scores. Skopje, an emerging tourist destination in the Republic of Macedonia, was selected for this study. The data for this study consisted of over a thousand user-generated reviews for 80 hotels that were posted on Booking.com and Tripadviser.com. Twenty hotel facilities influencing the hotel review score were identified, such as Sauna, Spa, Fitness Center, Soundproof, Free Parking and others. Relating the review score with hotel facilities was done through visual display and graphic analysis using the ArcGIS software. This enabled us to compare the hotel review score between 3, 4 and 5-star hotels and the hotel facilities. Depending on the hotel manager's needs, the users can browse hotels through ArcGIS map hotels according to popularity, number of stars, or distance to the city center. Many of the generated graph results revealed interesting patterns that can deliver powerful feedback relationships for researchers as well as hotel managers. In the future we plan to expand our analysis on other cities to provide comprehensives data statistics for the tourist sector in Republic of Macedonia.