Do all the service attributes matter? Application of customer review-based attribute extraction considering brand status

Customer satisfaction is crucial for effective marketing in the hospitality industry, and online reviews provide valuable insights. This study explores how service attributes influence customer satisfaction across six hotel brand statuses (Luxury to Economy) by analyzing over 110,000 online hotel reviews. Data preprocessing involved bidirectional encoder representations from transformers for sentence tokenization, while Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling extracted attributes. Valence aware dictionary sentiment analysis measured the emotional valence of these attributes. The Kano model classified attributes as must-be, one-dimensional, attractive, or indifferent, and we investigated how perceptions differed across brand statuses. A regression model evaluated the impact of these attributes on satisfaction, considering both mention frequency and sentiment. Results revealed that the impact of service attributes on customer satisfaction varied across brand statuses. Room Comfort was a Must-Be or One-dimensional attribute for Luxury and Upper Upscale brands; however, regression analysis indicated that frequent mentions were correlated with lower satisfaction, highlighting the importance of meeting basic expectations. Conversely, Customer Service was an Attractive attribute for Upscale, Midscale, and Economy brands, with positive sentiment enhancing satisfaction. Breakfast Service, Entertainment and Family activities, and Dining Experience were generally categorized as Indifferent, but positive sentiment toward these attributes had a significant positive impact on satisfaction, particularly in lower-tier segments, challenging the Kano framework’s assumption of negligible impact for Indifferent attributes. This study highlights the differences in attribute perception across brand statuses and challenging the assumption of negligible impact for certain auxiliary services. This provides practical guidance for enhancing satisfaction through brand-specific strategies.