Master Thesis Defense - July 7, 2015: Social Media in Quality Management: An Empirical Statistical Research on Hotel Online Review

Chengwei Zhao

Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 11:00 a.m.
Room EV003.309

You are invited to attend the following M.A.Sc. (Quality Systems Engineering) thesis examination.

Examining Committee

Dr. M. Mannan, Chair
Dr. C. Wang, Supervisor
Dr. X. Huang, Supervisor (JMSB)
Dr. A. Awasthi, CIISE Examiner
Dr. O. Kuzgunkaya, External Examiner (MIE)

Abstract

Hotel Online review is becoming a more and more popular topic in the hotel industry nowadays.  Lots of research has been done and many interesting implications have been investigated.  But very little research has been conducted from the different customer group perspective.

In my thesis, I conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis mainly from the different customer group perspective and found out some very meaningful implications for the hotel industry.  Some key contributions have been summarized below:

First, there exist significant mean differences in terms of six individual ratings and overall rating among different customer groups (family, business, friend, solo, and couple).  Second, the six different individual review items account for different weights in the overall rating scale.  Third, there is a significant positive relationship between six individual review items and overall rating.  Fourth, independent hotels are making better performance than chain hotels except for some certain customer group in terms of rooms and sleep quality rating.  Also, among the five different customer groups, the ratings of individual and overall given by business customer group are the lowest compared with the other groups.  These implications will help hotels allocate their resources more flexible and efficient rather than focus on every single aspect.  Especially for those small and medium sized hotels, they may be able to run better business since they now learn where to allocate more resources according to the rank of the importance.