Text Mining for the Hotel Industry

TLDR

Text mining of abundant online data offers hoteliers a way to gather competitive and strategic intelligence, though current software is costly but expected to become cheaper, and while static competitor statistics are easy to collect, dynamic data like room rates remain harder to obtain. The study demonstrates a text‑mining approach that aggregates data on Hong Kong hotels and prospective travelers. The approach successfully extracts customer demographics and attitudes from newsgroup postings with reasonable accuracy.

Abstract

With the availability of huge volumes of text-based information freely available on the Internet, text mining can be used by hoteliers to develop competitive and strategic intelligence. Although the software needed to analyze online text files remains comparatively expensive, the cost will inevitably fall. A demonstration of text mining compiled information about Hong Kong hotels and about would-be travelers. Such relatively invariant information as statistics on competitors’ facilities is fairly easy to assemble, but variant information, such as room rates, can be elusive. Customers’ demographics and attitudes can be mined with reasonable accuracy from newsgroup postings and the like.