ATTRIBUTES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO GUEST SATISFACTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVIEWS POSTED ON BOOKING.COM AND ON AIRBNB’S PLATFORM

User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful tool used to attract tourists to a destination and to market certain tourism products and services. Reviews of hotels and other tourism accommodation rentals are increasingly used by travelers to select their accommodation, thus, facilitating independent travel planning. This study is attempting to understand and compare the factors that contribute to customer satisfaction for hotel and Airbnb apartment guests in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. We employed reviews published by users on booking.com (for hotel customers) and on the Airbnb platform between May and November 2018 and quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed them using QDA Miner and Wordstat to understand the main attributes associated with guest satisfaction. The study revealed that the two lists of attributes that determine guest satisfaction are, to a great extent, similar. This means that guests have the same criteria in mind when evaluating their hotel and Airbnb stay. However, two attributes were found to be important only to Airbnb guests (“good communication” and “easy check in/out”) and three to hotel guests (“good breakfast”, “nice view” and “parking”). The findings have a number of theoretical and managerial implications which are discussed at the end of the paper.