What online review features really matter? An explainable deep learning approach for hotel demand forecasting

Accurate demand forecasting plays a critical role in hotel revenue management. Online reviews have emerged as a viable information source for hotel demand forecasting. However, existing hotel demand forecasting studies leverage only sentiment information from online reviews, leading to capturing insufficient information. Furthermore, prevailing hotel demand forecasting methods either lack explainability or fail to capture local correlations within sequences. In this study, we (1) propose a comprehensive framework consisting of four components: expertise, sentiment, popularity, and novelty (ESPN framework), to investigate the impact of online reviews on hotel demand forecasting; (2) propose a novel dual attention‐based long short‐term memory convolutional neural network (DA‐LSTM‐CNN) model to optimize the model effectiveness. We collected online review data from Ctrip.com to evaluate our proposed ESPN framework and DA‐LSTM‐CNN model. The empirical results show that incorporating features derived from the ESPN improves forecasting accuracy and our DA‐LSTM‐CNN significantly outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art models. Further, we use a case study to illustrate the explainability of the DA‐LSTM‐CNN, which could guide future setups for hotel demand forecasting systems. We discuss how stakeholders can benefit from our proposed ESPN framework and DA‐LSTM‐CNN model.