Evaluating visitor–therapist relationship in Indian spa and wellness resorts

What is it about?

This research examines the role of the therapist’s attributes, viz. expertise, sociability, likability and mindset-similarity, in building trust, satisfaction and commitment among visitors in Indian wellness resorts and hotels.The text mining approach was adapted to collect a large corpus of 3,94,373 online reviews from TripAdvisor, Google reviews, and hotels.com. This study uses unsupervised Naïve-Bayes classification and n-gram lexical TF-IDF vectorizer method to classify and find the sentiment of the reviews shared by the visitors of the wellness resorts. Additionally, multiple linear regression is performed to understand the impact of the therapist’s identified attributes on the visitor’s relationship quality.The research found positive sentiment towards the therapist’s likability, and visitors seemed satisfied with the overall wellness service. The sentiment towards trust and commitment is low. The study also found significant links between likability and expertise in building the relationship quality between the therapist and the visitors. The expertise of the therapist enhances visitors’ trust and willingness to return. The therapist’s likability nature helps in increasing visitor satisfaction.

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash