The Impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on Hotel Classification Ratings

Introduction

The traditional hotel classification system is undergoing a rapid transformation because of technological innovations in the business world. The transformation is mainly due to the emergence of the internet that led to establishing online travel agents (OTA’s) like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Yelp and many other such companies. These OTA’s publish millions of the reviews posted by the travellers who stay in such properties (Aristio, Supardi, Hendrawan & Hidayat, 2019). Professor Andrew McAfee coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0' to highlight the significance of social networking and computing on business organizations, leading the organizations to embrace change and rapid transformation (Lakhani &McAfee, 2015). Hospitality Industry is also transforming because of the emerging 'Enterprise 2.0' paradigm as an important channel for maintaining technological innovations for the hospitality sector to compete and succeed in the market (Büyüközkan, Feyzioğlu & Havle, 2019). Before the advent of the internet, travel used to be private, and experiences were shared with only a small circle of acquaintances characterized by mutual trust. However, with the advent of the internet, guest experiences have converted into global databases of consumer information managed by firms. Further, the process has enabled the user's real-time recording and sharing of experiences. Many studies showings the reasons for motivation for sharing experiences online pointed at altruistic and community-related motivations that include including reason for helping others (Munar and Jacobsen, 2014), emotional and social support (Baym, 2010) and providing advice on practical matters (Munar & Ooi, 2012).

Online travel agents like TripAdvisor also evaluate hotel services using several stars to represent customer satisfaction with hotel services. Such ratings are temporarily sensitive, continually reconfigured, personal and relatively based upon unregulated content (Talwar, Dhir, Kaur & Mäntymäki, 2020). TripAdvisor uses the Popularity Index calculated through algorithms to rank the accommodation. This index incorporates the traveller ratings to determine traveller satisfaction emphasizing the most recent information. The algorithm considers quality, quantity, and the recency of the reviews. The guests rate the properties on a scale of 1-5, where five stands for the best (TripAdvisor, 2021). The hotels are evaluated in terms of service, cleanliness, location, and overall impression of the property. The previous research studies on online hotel ratings focus on an econometric approach (Lee, Xie, Besharat & Tan, 2017; Xie, Zhang & Zhang, 2014), or a survey approach (Filieri, Alguezaui, & McLeay, 2015) using overall ratings, hotel stars, and the number of hotel reviews, as well as responses.

The study by (Hu & Chen 2016) adopted choose few cities for hotel review analysis. However, the study exploring how the relationship between ICT and traditional hotel ratings is yet to be explored. This study, therefore, bridges the gap to understanding the relationship between traditional hotel ratings and online hotel ratings, which are primarily driven by the revolution in ICT. The study's objectives include exploring the relationship between the two different ratings allocated to a sample of hotels in Greece and establishing if the hotels awarded higher star ratings by the traditional classification system (HOTREC) are also rated high by the travellers TripAdvisor. For this purpose, the online and traditional ratings of one hundred fifty hotels of one, two, three, four and five-star hotels in Greece shall be compared using the Kruskal-Wallis test shall be conducted. The results shall explain the relationship between the two hotel ratings- if they are in tandem with each other or have no relationship at all. The results shall explain how the travellers rate the hotels with high star ratings from the traditional rating system.