Good food, clean rooms and friendly staff: Implications of user-generated content for Slovenian skiing, sea and spa hotels’ management

Sa？etak The paper studies user-generated evaluations of hotels in three types of destinations in Slovenia (skiing, sea and spa). Using a broad dataset of user-generated evaluations for 28 different hotels and a combination of text mining and standard statistical methods we show how this data provides rich decision-making information. Although numerical evaluations of different destination types can hardly be directly compared due to different guest structure, the results show that guests in general evaluate in their texts primarily the “basics” (room, food/drink, staff). Using a combination of sentiment and novel aspect-based sentiment, hotels can monitor their competitiveness in time, across different types or brands, and use content analysis to further determine sources of competitive advantages in order to enhance performance. The article is the first comprehensive evaluation of Slovenian tourism using on-line peer reviews and provides a toolkit for similar applied analyses