Anam Afaq, Loveleen Gaur and Rajender Kumar
After the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant transformation has occurred in the metrics used to measure customer satisfaction and expectations. This shift has highlighted the paramount importance of addressing customer experiences and expectations within the hospitality industry. In response, this study aims to investigate and discern the perspectives of hotel guests regarding the services offered by fifteen prominent international hotel chains in the South Asia region. The objective is to uncover favourable and unfavourable viewpoints, ultimately contributing to an enhanced understanding of customer opinions in the post-COVID era. This study turns to social capital theory and develops a theoretical model to assist the process and identify how different global chain hotels engage with their hotel guests on Twitter. The authors carried out two analyses. Firstly, Python was used for tweet-mining and sentiment analysis (SA) (n=2,71,077 tweets). Secondly, the study undertook a thematic analysis (TA) to analyse how the outbreak of COVID-19 transformed guests' perceptions of the hotel service quality. Results of the study indicate an overall positive sentiment towards the hotels and identified themes based on customer expectations after the outbreak of COVID-19. This paper appears to be a pioneer study adopting a blend of sentiment and thematic analysis to uncover hotel guests' experiences/expectations after the global crisis.