Are the States United?

Abstract

This empirical data-driven research aims to unveil thought-provoking insights on the U.S. hotel offer across its 50 states. Information of more than 30,000 hotels was collected through web scraping from TripAdvisor. Using such data, 50 support vector machine models were trained to model the TripAdvisor score, one per state, to assess the convergent and divergent factors in customer satisfaction across all the U.S. states. A conceptual model is proposed and validated through the data-driven support vector machine models developed for each state to identify convergent features across the states to explain customer satisfaction (here represented by TripAdvisor score). Hotel size, price, and stars are not moderated by the location, expressed by the corresponding state, although these highly influence satisfaction, whereas both hotel number of published photos and the amenities are affected by the location. Thus, adaptation issues were found regarding amenities and published photos within each state’s offer.