Understanding tourists in Finland: Exploring online customer reviews on Finnish hotels: A big data study that analyzes user-generated reviews and provides Finnish hotels with tools to manage electronic word-of-mouth

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to shed light on tourists’ perceptions of Finnish hotels and how hotels manage their reputation on review sites such as TripAdvisor. Online reviewing has become significant phenomenon, which has great influence on both customers and hotels. For prospective hotel guests, opinions of other people affect directly to the booking intentions of hotels. Hotels on the other hand, can gain significant benefits from positive eWOM, while negative reviews can seriously damage the reputation of hotels.

Also, the traditional hospitality industry has faced some challenges in recent years as new types of accommodation options have increasingly claimed interest from tourists. Take Airbnb for example, which enables people to lease or rent short-term lodging. This means that hotels need to be able to adapt and renew their way of doing things. One opportunity surely lies in the management and utilization of online reviews.

The research thus focuses on identifying the most demanding hotel guests in Finland, and further understanding more about the rating behavior of different tourists. In addition, the role of hotel management is examined to the extent of replying to online reviews. The analysis of online customer reviews is done by grouping all samples into nationalities. Therefore, it is possible to compare cultural differences and see how user demographics affect one’s reviewing. MySQL database client is used to analyze the data, while some additional statistical tests were carried out on SPSS.

There were several key findings regarding the study. Most importantly, though, it was discovered that Finnish, Swedish and Germans are the most demanding hotel guests, while Russian and English native speaking tourists give superior reviews. Additionally, clear differences were found on the rating habits between genders, whereas age also seemed have influence on reviewing in general. Moreover, the analysis confirmed the suggestions of other researches that hotels rarely do have a strategic approach towards addressing online customer reviews. Thus, a framework is presented to provide hotel management with better tools to take full use of user-generated content.