IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/prbchp/978-3-031-87019-4_38.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

How Do Small Hotel Owners Influence the Guest Experience? A Netnographic Study in Kamena Vourla, Greece

In: Innovation and Creativity in Tourism, Business and Social Sciences

Author

Listed:
  • Alexander Pakhalov

    (University of Nicosia)

  • Iza Dombrovski

    (Lomonosov Moscow State University)

Abstract

Staff-customer interaction plays a crucial role in shaping the hotel guest experience. The owners of small hotels are also involved in service provision and interaction with guests. Although the empirical literature on host–guest relationships in home-sharing services is comprehensive, the role of owner-guest interactions in small hotels remains unexplored. Our study aims to examine the influence of owners on the guest experience using a netnographic approach. The study design is based on content analysis of 828 online reviews for 22 small family-run hotels in Kamena Vourla (a resort town in Central Greece) retrieved from Booking.com. We complement standard content analysis procedures by quantifying the emotionality of reviews using the Lexical Suite software. Results of the study reveal that the owners make a significant contribution to the guest experience in several hotels. Interacting with the owner changes the way guests describe their experience: reviews that mention owners are more emotional and less often contain information about inconveniences during the stay.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexander Pakhalov & Iza Dombrovski, 2025. "How Do Small Hotel Owners Influence the Guest Experience? A Netnographic Study in Kamena Vourla, Greece," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Vicky Katsoni & Carlos Costa (ed.), Innovation and Creativity in Tourism, Business and Social Sciences, pages 587-596, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-031-87019-4_38
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-87019-4_38
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Guest experience; Small family-run hotels; Hotel owners; Emotionality; Netnographic Study; Online reviews;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • M31 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Marketing
    • L83 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Sports; Gambling; Restaurants; Recreation; Tourism
    • Z33 - Other Special Topics - - Tourism Economics - - - Marketing and Finance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-031-87019-4_38. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.