Explaining differences in recommendation rates: the case of South Cyprus hotels

In this study we demonstrate how publicly available data can be used to work out the indirect importance of various hotel attributes for their visitors. We apply Shapley value decomposition of the recommendation rate to compute the percentage contributions of various attributes to the overall loyalty, which helps us explain why some of Cyprus hotels have higher satisfaction ratings than the others. It appeared that satisfaction with gastronomy is the key driver of the overall satisfaction with Cyprus hotels. We conduct importance-performance analysis for one of the hotels to demonstrate a strategic management application of our empirical analysis. Directions for other potential studies using user-generated content are proposed.