This project leverages text analysis of half a million reviews from TripAdvisor to evaluate whether reviews actually influence later guests’ behaviors or not.

While information and communication technologies (ICT) has been widely implemented for service innovation and excellence in the hotel industry, research exploring consumers’ evaluation about their ICT-based experiences from user-generated content (UGC) in social media is very limited. Therefore, the current study aims to explore the nature of online consumer (i.e., hotel guests) reviews regarding ICT and identify positive and negative effects of ICT-based hotel services on guest satisfaction by using recent business analytics techniques including data visualization, data mining, text mining, and sentiment analysis. The findings of this research project can offer several important theoretical and practical implications by (1) identifying key ICT-based hotel services and amenities, (2) examining their impact on guest satisfaction, and (3) presenting how UGC and business analytics techniques can be applied to academic/practical research in the hospitality and tourism literature. Furthermore, this project can help our students learn advanced analytic and research skills.