A study based on 130,000 hotels worldwide reported that at least 6.2% were certified with some form of sustainability certification scheme.

Indeed, social, economic, and environmental sustainability concerns have created demand across numerous industries for products and services that can work towards such sustainable goals. Do sustainable practices, however, influence guest perceptions, satisfaction and decision-making in the hospitality industry?

We wanted to study the relationship between guest reviews and sustainability within the hospitality industry in order to understand:

• How do guests incorporate sustainability into their hotel experience – determining the value they attribute to this?
• What do guests value in their experience and draw insights into how sustainability can enrich certain customer touchpoints?

METHODOLOGY

To understand the relationship between how people view sustainability and the hospitality industry, we utilised the support of Relative Insight, alongside the sustainability expertise of FuturePlus.

Relative Insight is an AI-powered comparative text analytics software, which allows you to draw insights from text data.

With the help of the Relative Insight team, customer review data was gathered on the top
100 hotels on Trustpilot and TripAdvisor.

These reviews were then split between the hotels that use FuturePlus and those that do not, providing us with a total of over 30 million words to analyse.

To filter the dataset down to include only the information relevant to our study, a sustainability- focused word matrix was developed and applied to the dataset.

This allowed the Relative Insight platform to highlight which aspects of sustainability were recurring across customer reviews. Additionally, the data was filtered to remove reviews over 10 years old. This reduced the number of words to a much more manageable ≈150,000.

Immediately, the Relative Insight platform allowed us to identify the most common words across all reviews. It also showed how much more or less likely these words were to occur in the reviews for hotels using FuturePlus and those not using FuturePlus.