Faculty Spotlight

Linchi Kwok was the Recipient of the "Best Research Paper" Award

Professor Linchi Kwok presentingAssociate Professor, Linchi Kwok, presented a working paper at the 2019 International Hospitality Information Technology Association (iHITA) Annual Conference in Minneapolis in June, in which he worked with a research team at Syracuse University in analyzing over 1.1 million online reviews for the Airbnb listings in the San Francisco and New York City markets under the 7Ps Model. Their paper entitled “Mining Airbnb users’ online reviews under the 7Ps Model: Do travelers share the same experience with different types of hosts?” won the Best Research Paper Award at the conference. After the conference, Dr. Kwok has submitted the paper to a journal for review and look forward to sharing his work in print with the Collins College family soon.

Kwok, L., Tang, Y., & Yu, B. (2019, June). Mining Airbnb users’ online reviews under the 7Ps Model: Do travelers share the same experience with different types of hosts? Refereed research paper presented at the 2019 (iHITA) Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN. **Recipient of the Best Research Paper Award.

Abstract:

The 7Ps Model is a very useful tool in helping service firms solve managerial issues in marketing. Guided by the 7Ps marketing mix framework, a big-data, supervised machine learning analysis was performed with 1,148,062 English reviews for 37,092 Airbnb listings in San Francisco and New York City. The results disclose similar patterns in both markets, where travelers shared their experience about Product and Physical Evidence most often; Price and Promotion were the least mentioned elements. Furthermore, through a series of comparisons of Airbnb’s 7Ps marketing mix among the listings managed by different types of hosts, it seems multi-unit and single-unit hosts offer similar services with a small observable difference; whereas “superhosts” and the ordinary hosts deliver different services. This study adds new insights to the service marketing and home-sharing literature. Besides the study’s methodological contributions, managerial implications for the hosts and webmasters on home-sharing websites, hoteliers, and policymakers are discussed.