Evaluating visitors' sentiment towards wellness resorts: insights from an emerging market

Public awareness of the benefits of wellness care and the mushrooming of wellness care centres in India creates a scope for analysing the important factors to build customer relationships. The present research makes a novel contribution by empirically evaluating and prioritising the antecedents of visitor relationship quality in the context of Indian wellness resorts and hotels. An n-gram lexical TF-IDF vectoriser method is used to find the sentiment of the reviews shared by the visitors of the wellness resorts. The RIDIT and GRA methods were then applied to rank the antecedents of therapist-visitor relationship quality. Likeability is the most important antecedent followed by customer orientation, expertise, sociability and similarity. The findings of this research can aid the hospitality managers to devise targeted and customised strategies to enhance overall service experience and build enduring customer relationships by offering offer high end services, thereby adding novelty to the research.