Discovery of factors affecting tourists' fine dining experiences at five-star hotel restaurants in Istanbul

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to discover the factors affecting customer delight, satisfaction and dissatisfaction in fine dining experiences (FDEs). Design/methodology/approach Online user generated 2,585 reviews on TripAdvisor for 46 five-star hotel restaurants operating in Istanbul were analyzed with the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm. Findings LDA created nine, eight and seven topics for delight, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, respectively. The most salient topics for customer delight, satisfaction and dissatisfaction in FDEs are staff (17.3%), view (19%), and food quality (23%), respectively. Originality/value This study is one of the few studies investigating customer delight and satisfaction together. The study shows that FDEs can be analyzed with text mining techniques. Moreover, the study contributes to the literature on customer delight by adding staff topic as an antecedent.