Hotel Ratings Get Sentimental

July 3, 2011

Viva Las Vegas! And if I’m “viva-ing” Las Vegas, I’d stay at the luxurious Bellagio. So why, when comparing the Bellagio to the like of Bally’s on TripAdvisor, did Bally’s have a higher score? It seems mind-boggling to me and made Lexalytics, who generated TripAdvisor’s online review scores, scratch there collective heads as well. In the Forbes article “Text Analytics Show Why Bellagio Underperforms Bally’s” Lexalytics went beyond the score and analyzed the actual text of the reviews to get some answers.

Jeff Catlin, Lexalytics CEO said that in the past “year or two he has seen a sharp rise in use of electronic sentiment monitoring in customer relationship management (CRM) and in travel and tourism.” When they applied their sentiment analytic tools to the Bellagio test case, they found the people simply expected more for their money and expected more from a 5-star hotel. Catlin went on to say that:

Through the simple application of sentiment analysis of publicly available information, we show that companies can make these comparisons with much higher reliability, at minimal incremental cost, and with an unprecedented ability to adjust categories on-the-fly, either based on these results, or to test out new hypotheses. In fact, using this technique, we can move beyond the limitations of traditional approaches by running additional analysis to discover new, previously unmeasured categories based on recurring themes within the data.

What an interesting use of the natural language process and I bet that companies who utilize sentiment analytics will see a competitive advantage because they can get beyond the consensus opinion get down to an individual level. It is all about getting personal and who knows, I just may have to rethink my Vegas accommodations next time.

Jennifer Wensink, July 3, 2011

Holiday freebie

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