Factors influencing travellers’ e-ratings and e-complaints about hotel services: Insights from an Italian tourism destination

The internet, and User Generated Content (UGC) in particular, has provided new ways through which consumers dissatisfied with hotel services can air their complaints. This research applied content analysis to one of the numerous hotel review websites available on the Internet (booking.com) to study the overall ratings given by travellers and the words used in their comments, in order to identify the most frequent complaints. In particular, this paper aims at investigating how consistent customer ratings and their complaint behaviour are with their socio-demographic characteristics (i.e., gender and culture/country of origin), with whom they are travelling (e.g., alone, with family, etc.), with the time of year when their stay took place (winter, mid-season and summer) and with several hotels operational/business indicators (i.e., hotel class and size). Implications for hotel managers are discussed and suggestions for further research are given.