Using hotel web ratings data: understanding customers' overall satisfaction ratings.

This article presents techniques that hotel managers can use to analyze online rating data and effectively allocate scarce resources to improve a hotel�s overall customer ratings. We apply the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) technique to analyze online hotel customer component ratings and their relationship to overall hotel satisfaction ratings. We demonstrate that the CART technique shows how strongly component ratings associate with the overall hotel satisfaction rating. Although customer satisfaction ratings are important to customer decisions about which hotel to engage, we have found that little research has been done on this topic. We provide recommendations to hotel managers about how they can collect and analyze online ratings data to help improve the overall satisfaction of their customers.