Enhancing the Hospitality Experience for Foreign Guests in South Korean Hotels: Insights from Online Reviews

With the increasing popularity of South Korea as a tourist destination owing to Hallyu (Korean wave), the hotels have experienced a surge in the number of foreign guests. Although COVID-19 halted the tourism industry for a while, the recent lifting of travel bans and restrictions has opened the doors for the tourism industry to flourish again. However, the study regarding the accommodation experiences of Foreign Guests in South Korea is limited. To bridge this gap, this study explores the accommodation attributes important to English Speaking Tourists. It also makes various suggestions in the line of targeted marketing including hotel-country groups and the distribution of topics (service attributes) across the countries. A total of 50,175 online English reviews from hotels based in Seoul listed on TripAdvisor were analyzed for customers’ sentiments regarding the accommodation experiences through Text Mining techniques. Findings revealed that the hotels in “Myeongdong” and “Gangnam” had more positive reviews than others. Managers should focus on overcoming language barriers and providing friendly services. The study also highlighted that providing transportation service to the Airport is one of the important dimensions to improve guest satisfaction. Further, all reviews were modeled using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to investigate the important aspects that need improvement followed by detailed analysis. This analysis is valuable for hotel managers to improve the satisfaction of the guests by studying the common extracted topics and unique dimensions and thus better understanding the customer’s accommodation needs which in turn will help in improving their competitiveness in the industry by developing better marketing strategies.