Chart depicting Relationship between Emotions expressed and Recommend/ Not (Five star/ luxury) — Photo by EHL

As service organisations place more emphasis on user generated content (UGC) and commercial review sites for communication and feedback from both existing customers and potential customers, it is important to examine the "emotions or sentiments" expressed in the context of UGC in the post- purchase sharing of experiences. Moreover, which emotions/ sentiments expressed are linked to the recommendation of the hotel within the commentaries posted?

Clearly, the expressing of emotions not only acts as a tangible "memory marker" but also raises important issues as to how customers summarize and express their hotel experience in text-based commentaries on sites such as TripAdvisor. Particularly of interest are how they express emotions in these commentaries and how the negative and positive emotions are translated into actual words. The "emotions" expressed in user-generated-content (UGC) also represent valuable cues and information sources for prospective purchasers, with consequent marketing implications (though, whether sentiment can be truly measured is still in question according to many marketers).

This article is part of wider research project funded by HES SO (An Exploration of Social Media on Hotel Buyer Behaviour (pre and post purchase) - the role of RELEVANCE and RECALL) which is also supported by Brand Karma. The main objective in this extract is to share the preliminary results and address the question: What emotional expressions (on Tripadvisor) evoke recommendation in luxury/ 5 star hotel?

For this part of the study, the five star/ luxury category is composed of 10 randomly chosen hotels in London with a total 918 commentaries collected and a total of 200, 000 descriptive words.

Preliminary results in the chart below indicate that emotions are linked to recommendation (or not!). For the Five star/ luxury sector, the strongest relationship are in the emotional commentaries relating to staff (and the descriptors are linked toward the staff). The 2nd and 3rd ranking emotional commentaries are affection and glory) for the Five star/ luxury sector and reveals the link between emotions and recommendation. The emotional commentaries that represent glory are related to the visual aspects of the hotel.

Interestingly, a number of emotions are not present in these commentaries, including emotions that are often evoked in hotel promotional communication e.g. emotions such as peaceful or inspired. Excitement, which is often a focus of promotional efforts, ranks very low on Five star/ luxury hotels segments.

It is too early to state how hoteliers can exploit the emotional appeal in these commentaries to improve brand image, sales conversions etc. From the hotelier point of view it may be possible to see if the brand values, particularly the emotional cues, are perceived and interpreted by the customer as such. Additionally, identifying the key emotions that provoke recommendations is critical to hoteliers as they might concentrate on stimulating these particular emotions, through both tangible elements and non-tangible elements to encourage repeat visits and visible recommendation to others, i.e. the vast number of future online readers of these commentaries.

Academic research and business metrics to measure online emotions and sentiments are in the early stages of development and more research is required to anlayse qualitative UGC into a more dependable and intuitive format. To incorporate both the qualitative and quantitative view would be constructive for both researchers and hotel companies and would provides insights to the wealth of opinions and views expressed in the online environment. One of the main aims of this research is the development of a new "dictionary of online emotional expressions" in order to build an emotional index that will measure how passionate/ emotional/ customers are about a brand or a specific property.

For more information on this research contact [email protected] or [email protected]

About EHL Group

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Hilary Catherine Murphy
Professor of Information Technology & Digital Marketing
+41 21 785 1496
EHL