What is the impact of service quality on customers’ satisfaction during COVID-19 outbreak? New findings from online reviews analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major global changes both in the areas of healthcare and economics. This pandemic has led, mainly due to conditions related to confinement, to major changes in consumer habits and behaviors. Although there have been several studies on the analysis of customers’ satisfaction through survey-based and online customers’ reviews, the impact of COVID-19 on customers' satisfaction has not been investigated so far. It is important to investigate dimensions of satisfaction from the online customers’ reviews to reveal their preferences on the hotels' services during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study aims to reveal the travelers’ satisfaction in Malaysian hotels during the COVID-19 outbreak through online customers’ reviews. In addition, this study investigates whether service quality during COVID-19 has an impact on hotel performance criteria and consequently customers' satisfaction. Accordingly, we develop a new method through machine learning approaches. The method is developed using text mining, clustering, and prediction learning techniques. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for big data analysis to identify the voice-of-the-customer, Expectation-Maximization (EM) for clustering, and ANFIS for satisfaction level prediction. In addition, we use Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD) for missing value imputation. The data was collected from TripAdvisor regarding the travelers’ concerns in the form of online reviews on the COVID-19 outbreak and numerical ratings on hotel services from different perspectives. The results from the analysis of online customers’ reviews revealed that service quality during COVID-19 has an impact on hotel performance criteria and consequently customers' satisfaction. In addition, the results showed that although the customers are always seeking hotels with better performance, they are also concerned with the quality of related services in the COVID-19 outbreak.