Beyond Service and Cleanliness: Decoding Customer Experiences and Determinants of Satisfaction in Esports-Themed Hotels Through Large-Scale Online Review Text Mining

Although esports-themed hotels have rapidly emerged as a technology-driven segment of smart hospitality, empirical research on their customer experience and satisfaction formation remains limited. Drawing on schema theory and expectancy violations theory (EVT), this study adopts a mixed-methods approach to examine the thematic attributes of esports-themed hotel experiences and their effects on customer satisfaction. Study 1 applied BERTopic and aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) to 225,318 online reviews of 1601 esports-themed hotels. The results show that customer experience encompasses not only conventional hotel attributes, such as service, environment, and cleanliness, but also esports-specific attributes centered on gaming facilities, technological configurations, and esports-related social activities. ABSA results further reveal generally positive sentiment across most attributes, with service attitude and cleanliness receiving the strongest approval, whereas room facilities and comfort were the main sources of dissatisfaction. Study 2 employed hierarchical linear modeling to further examine the effects of six experience-related sentiments on customer satisfaction. The results indicate that all six sentiment dimensions significantly influence satisfaction and that hotel type moderates these relationships. Compared with professional esports-themed hotels (PETHs), the effects of experience-related sentiments on satisfaction are stronger in non-professional esports-themed hotels (NPETHs). This study extends schema theory and EVT to the esports-themed hotel context and offers practical implications for customer experience design and service management in this emerging hospitality segment.