Understanding customer experience with Vietnamese hotels by analyzing online reviews

On the post-pandemic recovery green economy track, especially in the hospitality and tourism industry, businesses must accelerate digital transformation and increase customer experience. Understanding customers’ emotions and needs after using hotel services is crucial, so businesses increasingly rely on online customer reviews on booking sites to gain insights. By understanding their needs and experiences, hotel managers can tailor services to meet expectations and improve quality. Although online review analysis is practical, a specific model, method, or tool is needed to explore customer emotions. This study proposes a method to analyze customers’ online reviews of Vietnamese hotel services. Using 20,551 reviews collected from TripAdvisor, the study examines customers’ perceptions of Vietnamese hotel services overall and by aspect, combining natural language lexical rules and inferential statistics. Key findings indicate customers are most satisfied with the “place” aspect (78% satisfaction), while the “room” aspect has the lowest satisfaction (61.3%). These results recommend that hotel managers in Vietnam prioritize understanding customers’ sentiments and opinions to improve service quality in lower-satisfaction aspects.

Ha Thi Thu Nguyen, Trung Xuan Nguyen