118 – TMG’s Summer Guest Sentiment Report: Key Takeaways

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Join Suite Spot Host, Ryan Embree, as he and Chief Technology Officer,Jason Lee, break down the insights and data collected in the 2nd edition of our TMG Summer Guest Sentiment Report on the podcast. This episode contains valuable information for hoteliers looking to make better operational and strategic decisions for their hotels as the end of the year approaches while closing out the year strong. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: This is your host, Ryan Embree here, coming from the content creation studio in Maitland, Florida at the headquarters of Travel Media Group. Got another great episode for you today with a very special guest, but a guest that has been with us a lot of times on these episode. Jason Lee, Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason, thanks again for joining the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: All right, thanks for having me, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and this has become a little bit of a tradition here with these episodes that we're doing. We're gonna talk about summer guest sentiment. Now, for those listeners or viewers, if you're watching us on YouTube here, give us a little background about guest sentiment, how we're pulling it and what the trends and insights we're gonna be talking about today. Jason Lee: Okay, so here at Travel Media Group, we process all reviews received by hotels in the United States. So meaning we, we bring them into our system. We use natural language processing to kind of pull out specific keywords, and then we use that same kind of processing in an AI that actually decides whether this is positive or negative. So taking all of that information and sort of splicing it and dicing it. But then we call it sentence chunks, but it's looking at little chunks of sentences that basically would determine whether or not those key words are positive or negative. So that's where all of this comes from. So it, so you could have, in one single review, you could have five or six sentiment points, and you know, that review could be rated positively, but the actual language could have positive and negative pieces to it. So we do not take rating into account. It is all based on the actual language in the review. Ryan Embree: Well, that's important because we've talked about before a four or five star rating could still have some negative elements to it. Right? Absolutely. You know, everything was great in my stay, but you know, I felt like the parking was a little expensive, or there might be some positive sentiment with the negative reviews where, you know, everything seemed to go wrong, except the staff was just super nice and friendly the entire time. So that's why it's so important to kind of break down these patterns and trends. And when he says every single review, we're talking big numbers, 1.6 million reviews, that is 100,000 more than we got when we did this in the spring, which is expected. Summer still continues to be our busiest travel season, but within that 1.6 million reviews, over 7 million pieces of guest sentiment. So subjects, topics, elements of a review that people are talking about having sentiment towards, that's all broken down in these insights and data. Jason Lee: Yeah, we use the kind of bigger categories. So the main categories we have are the room, the service experience, and the facility experience. So we use those sort of as the bigger category, and then we have a bunch of tags and aspects inside of each one of those categories. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And what we're gonna do today on this episode, Jason, is we're gonna give some of our key takeaways and insights to all of this data, right? Me and you, we absolutely love this data. We could probably spend hours talking about it, dissecting it and putting it, you know,