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Factors influencing Travellers’ e-Ratings and e-Complaints about Hotel Services: Insights from an Italian Tourism Destination

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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2012

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Abstract

The Internet, and in particular User Generated Content (UGC), has provided new ways through which consumers dissatisfied with hotel services can air their complaints. This research applied content analysis to one of the numerous hotel review websites available on the Internet (booking.com) to study the overall ratings given by travellers and the words used in their comments, in order to identify the most frequent complaints. In particular, this paper aims at investigating how consistent customer ratings and their complaint behaviour are with their socio-demographic characteristics (i.e., gender and culture/country of origin), with whom they are travelling (e.g., alone, with family, etc.), with the time of year when their stay took place (winter, mid-season and summer) and with several hotels operational/business indicators (i.e., hotel class and size). Implications for hotel managers are discussed and suggestions for further research are given.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Business and Law, University of Sassari and CRENoS, Italy

    Giacomo Del Chiappa

  2. Econstat and Luiss University, Italy

    Stefano Dall’Aglio

Authors
  1. Giacomo Del Chiappa
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  2. Stefano Dall’Aglio
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Human Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden

    Matthias Fuchs

  2. Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Francesco Ricci

  3. Faculty of Communication Sciences, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Lorenzo Cantoni

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Del Chiappa, G., Dall’Aglio, S. (2012). Factors influencing Travellers’ e-Ratings and e-Complaints about Hotel Services: Insights from an Italian Tourism Destination. In: Fuchs, M., Ricci, F., Cantoni, L. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2012. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1142-0_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1142-0_39

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-7091-1141-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-1142-0

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