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The increasing availability of consumer feedback on the web provides a wealth of information that organizations can use for product and service improvement. Many consumer feedback sites allow users to enter both a quantitative rating and a qualitative critique. Previous research has used this information disjunctively. This work proposes an innovative approach that integrates the two types of information to identify words that are related to positive or negative consumer ratings. A case study shows that this approach does raise some issues not identified using existing analytical approaches.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how well hotel website load time performance compared against customer expectation benchmarks. In a competitive market, service interactions are important. As customers move to mobile devices, the time to load a website is a critical part of the service delivery. Long load times can lead to poor service experiences, customer frustration and lost business. Hotel website load times on both mobile and desktop devices were examined and compared to service expectations. Design/methodology/approach The study used an online service to assess and compare website load performance using both desktop and mobile devices for 259 international hotel company and sub-brand websites. Findings The time to load hotel websites was significantly slower on mobile devices compared to desktops. Load times on both platforms exceeded 3 s, which is considered best practice. Long load times represent a service gap and can cause dissatisfaction resulting in a potential customer abandoning the website for a competitor’s site, thus affecting sales. Research limitations/implications While the population for the study was robust in size and contained most of the major hotel companies worldwide, it was not exhaustive. Data also represent a snapshot and will change over time. Load times vary based on test location, access device and network traffic. Additionally, web page load times and customer expectations will change as technology evolves. Originality/value Increased use of mobile devices for hotel reservations increases the importance of mobile service delivery. This is the first known study to measure hotel website load times for mobile devices, and to examine both mobile and desktop performance against best practice. The results of this study highlight a service gap, which can lead to loss of business. Given the consistency of the results, the authors suspect that this is an issue that has not been recognized within the industry. This study is valuable because it exposes an issue of website design not generally addressed in the hospitality industry, even though tools are available to monitor site performance.

Data collection is always a challenge. Researchers in the hospitality and tourism industry can benefit from the extensive amount of industry related data that are publicly available on the Internet. The issue holding most researchers back is how to efficiently collect such data. This article provides a solution: automated data collection using Web spiders. The coding logic needed to implement a custom Web spider is outlined. Also addressed are the ethical and operational issues associated with Web spiders.