Reputation and Guest Experience in Bali’s Spa Hotels: A Big Data Perspective

This study examines how psycholinguistic features of online reviews relate to guest satisfaction in Bali’s spa hotel market. Using LIWC-22 category rates from Google Maps reviews, a corpus of 15,560 quality-filtered reviews from ten leading spa hotels was analyzed. Exploratory factor analysis yielded four interpretable dimensions—Social, Health and Wellness, Emotional Tone, and Lifestyle. In regressions predicting review star ratings (satisfaction), Social ( β = 0.028) and Health and Wellness ( β = 0.023) showed small but statistically detectable positive associations, whereas Emotional Tone ( β = 0.006, t = 0.727) and Lifestyle ( β = 0.004, t = 0.476) were not significant. The model’s explained variance is negligible (R 2 = 0.001; F = 5.283, p < 0.05), reflecting the many influences on ratings beyond review language; findings are interpreted as directional associations rather than predictive effects. Practically, the results point to prioritizing interpersonal service cues and wellness/treatment assurances, with tone monitoring being used for service-recovery signals. The design favors interpretability (validated, word-based categories; full-history snapshot) over black-box complexity, and transferability is Bali-specific and conditional on comparable market features. Future work should add contextual covariates (e.g., price and location), apply explicit temporal segmentation, extend to multilingual corpora, and triangulate text analytics with brief questionnaires and qualitative inquiry to strengthen validity and explanatory power.