"Journey Through Opinions: Unravelling Heritage Hotel Experience And Customer Sentiment Through Topic Modelling In Online Reviews – A Case Study Of Taj Udaipur"

Abstract

Purpose: In business, online reviews have an economic impact on firm performance. The study is an analysis of the online reviews written by customers about Taj Udaipur a heritage hotel in Hyderabad. It aims to analyze reviews with polarity classification and to identify the overall sentiment of the collected reviews.

Design/methodology/approach: A total of 3000 online reviews about the hotel were collected from the TripAdvisor website and web scraping was done by using a beautiful soup package in Python. Orange data mining software was applied to pre-process and analyze the data. VADER sentiment analysis is used to generate the polarity and overall sentiment of the reviews. The study categorizes the emotions of reviews as positive, neutral, and negative.

Findings: The sentiment analysis and topic modelling performed on internet reviews of Taj Udaipur have uncovered fascinating insights regarding the overall experience of guests. Upon analyzing the sentiments conveyed by reviewers, a prevailing sense of optimism becomes apparent, as a substantial majority express satisfaction and pleasure. The emotion distribution reveals a positive inclination towards several aspects of the heritage hotel.

Originality/value: The study is a rare attempt to examine online customer reviews of Taj using a text mining approach and to identify the sentiment scores of the online reviews to know the satisfaction and dissatisfaction.