Longitudinal Sales Responses with Online Reviews

The longitudinal impact of online consumer reviews on hotel sales is studied. Different from previous efforts using pure ratings, this study explores the extraction and representation of consumer sentiments within review comments in an iterative approach. Initially, we define a few primary attributes as seeds to mine review patterns which are frequently used by consumers to express their sentiments. Opinion words, being used to express the specific opinions, are then discovered based on the primary attributes and the review patterns. More new attributes, opinion words and review patterns can be obtained in an iterative manner. Afterwards, each comment will be rated with a pertinent score to reflect the consumer sentiment. Both consumer ratings and sentiment ratings are used to ex-amine the economic effect of reviews on hotel sales. Evaluations on practical hotel-booking reviews and sales data are conducted and several important findings are revealed.