Customer electronic word of mouth management strategies based on computing with words: the case of spanish luxury hotel reviews on tripAdvisor

Abstract

The rapid growth of the internet and social media has made electronic word of mouth (eWOM) a key element of modern marketing. In the hospitality industry, nowadays, effective eWOM management is essential for developing impactful strategies and fostering customer satisfaction. This paper introduces an enhanced approach to strategic customer base management based on online reviews by extending the Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) model with three novel dimensions, the Helpfulness, Promoter Score, and Stability of the customer, thereby forming the RFHPS model. It also includes the 2-tuple linguistic model, one of the most popular computing with words models, to improve precision in the RFHPS score’s computation and the findings’ interpretability. Using K-means clustering, customers are segmented across these five dimensions. The data on luxury hotels in Spain gathered from TripAdvisor demonstrate the model’s applicability. By integrating this framework into customer relationship management systems, managers can tailor marketing strategies for distinct segments, facilitating deeper customer understanding and bolstering eWOM generation.