Exploring Hotel Employees’ Individual and Work-Related Outcomes from the aspect of Customer Online Reviews: A Qualitative Approach

The purpose of this study is to determine hotel employees individual traits and work-related attitudes and behaviors based on customer e-reviews. Qualitative research methods were used to analyze the data gathered from 522 foreign customers e-comments in English for three resort hotels (high scored in top-3 on an international online commercial travel platform, dated to the year 2013) located in Antalya Region, southern coast of Turkey. Firstly, results indicated that customers have generally evaluated hotel all employees as highly friendly, helpful, hard-working, polite, lovely, amazing, smiling, efficient and attentive persons. Secondly, they evaluated individual traits of the only certain departments staff; Entertainment Staff as highly entertaining, hard-working, and friendly persons; Food and Beverage (service) Staff as highly friendly and smiling persons; Front-Office Staff as highly friendly and helpful persons, and Housekeeping Staff as neat, smiling and brilliant persons. Finally, customers evaluated employees work-related attitudes and behaviors as the aspect of interaction, relationship, service performance, extra-roles and service/customer orientation. A discussion of the findings, implications, and recommendations for future research were all presented.