Hotel Tourists Perception of Service Quality during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Themes in Online Reviews

The aim of this study is to understand the service quality perceived by tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study data consisted of a total of 1,030 online reviews obtained from the online platform TripAdvisor site. The data of the study were collected from a total of 15 five-star hotels in Antalya. To be able to process the secondary data collected from TripAdvisor, latest version of Leximancer 5.0 was used. The content analyses results’ demonstrated presence of eight themes/concepts in hotel tourists’ online descriptions of hotel perceptions during the COVID-19 pandemic which are; “staff”, “hotel”, “restaurant”, “COVID-19”, “room”, “pool”, “entertainment” and “family”. Second objective of this research was to determine whether tourists who scored their hotel experiences as high (i.e. 4 or 5 out of 5 points) or low (i.e. 1 or 2 out of 5 points). The group who rated their experience satisfactory in other words the portion who rated hotel service quality shared narratives among “staff”, “room” and the “hotel” theme. In contrast, group who rated their hotel experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic low shared narratives on “queue”, “lift”, “waiting”, “guidelines”, “social distancing”, “restrictions”, “hygiene”, “cancelled”, “restrictions”, and “people”. Implication as well as future avenues for further research also discussed. Keywords: service quality; user-generated content; COVID-19 pandemic; hotels; Antalya