Does traveler satisfaction differ in various travel group compositions?

1. Introduction

Customers often post their reviews online after their hotel staying experience and share their experiences on various social media (Sotiriadis and Sotiriadis, 2017), which generates electronic word of mouth (eWOM) to influence potential customers’ purchasing intention and behavior (Cantallops and Salvi, 2014). Online reviews offer opportunities to examine customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction sources. Positive reviews indicate customer satisfaction, whereas negative reviews indicate customer dissatisfaction (Xu and Li, 2016). Compared with customer ratings, the open structure of textual reviews allows customers’ consumption experiences and perceptions to be reflected more comprehensively and accurately (Xiang et al., 2015); thus, scholars have given more attention recently to textual reviews (Berezina et al., 2016; Xiang et al., 2015; Xu and Li, 2016). However, because of the frequent long length, substantial number and open structure of online textual reviews, extracting key points from textual reviews can be complex and challenging and exacerbate information overload in the big data era (Gandomi and Haider, 2015).

Most of the previous studies examining online customer reviews of hotels have placed customers in a single group (Berezina et al., 2016), and research on online review behavioral comparisons between customers is lacking (Cantallops and Salvi, 2014). More research needs to be done to examine the online review behavior of customers from different backgrounds and on different kinds of trips (Cantallops and Salvi, 2014). This study fills the research gap by discussing the role of co-travelers on a leisure trip (i.e. travel group composition) in influencing travelers’ online review behavior and the determinants of their overall satisfaction with hotels. Co-customers can affect customers’ perception during the consumption experience through three social forces: immediacy, power and number of co-customers (Miao et al., 2011).

Travelers in different travel group compositions have different perceptions of the product/service quality because they have different needs and expectations (Ramanathan and Mcgill, 2007).

This study aims to investigate customers’ online review behavior and determinants of overall satisfaction with hotels from the online textual reviews of leisure travelers in different travel group compositions. Specifically, two research questions served as guidelines: RQ1.

What are the positive/negative factors extracted from reviews from travelers in each travel group composition regarding online review behaviors?

RQ2.

Which positive/negative factors positively/negatively influence travelers’...