Big data in the Tourism Industry:how online reviews can affect hotel performance

Abstract

If we think of the new Industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the first sector that we come up with is manufacturing, but of course it is not the only one. This new revolution has been so disruptive to affect every single aspect of our modern society, by changing the industry in a total different way compared to the previous Industrial revolutions. The main feature of this revolution is the Big Data. Big data is the new way to indicate the large volume of data, both structured and unstructured, that flows into a business on a daily basis. This big data can be analyzed for insights that can lead to better decisions and business strategy formulations. The potential for the Tourism industry is quite big: to collect, extract and well interpret the dataset which represents the behavior, the choices and even the “feelings” of the tourists will be operations focused on the analysis of further data which are not influenced by the habits and lifestyles, preferences and the real touristic flows. These will be very valuable information for those who will be able to exploit it. This paperwork has the aim to focus the attention to the hospitality industry where it can be very valuable to exploit the potential of big data in order to improve the performance and consequently to translate it into an increase in revenues. Big data can be crucial either for big hotel chain or smaller hotels and accommodation facilities such as B&B, that thanks to cheaper and available data can make better strategic decision to be more competitive and productive. In order to do that hotels should monitor and enhance their online visibility and reputation, aimed at attracting new potential customers and to retain the current ones. One of the best mechanism to do that is to monitor the online reviews that satisfied and unsatisfied customer release on the web, in particular on online customer reviews platforms like TripAdvisor. Thanks to the monitoring of such opinions about them, hotels can learn about travelers preferences and about what aspect of their structures should be improved or fixed. It has been proved that online reviews can affect other travelers’ purchasing behavior because the reviews writers are considered to be more reliable and less biased than the service providers and the pure advertising, and consequently they can impact hotel financial performance. It will be used a sample of a group of Venetian hotels to find a relation between online visibility and the economic performance in the Hospitality industry.