Editor’s note: Tom Anderson is managing partner of Anderson Analytics LLC, a Stamford, Conn., research firm. The information in this article relating to the Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc. text mining project was originally presented at the 2005 SPSS Decisions conference. The information relating to Web scraping and text mining in the leisure industry will be presented at the ESOMAR leisure research conference in Rome on November 5-7, 2006.

Would you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to collect valuable customer comments and not read them? It seems unlikely, yet we have found that most companies essentially do just that, most likely because the sheer volume of text data available for analysis just isn’t manageable.

However, thanks to advances in text mining software available from companies such as SPSS, Clear Forest and Leximancer, analyzing thousands of open-ended customer comments is finally possible.

Starwood is one of the world’s largest hotel and leisure companies. It conducts its hotel and leisure business both directly and through its subsidiaries. Its brand names include St. Regis, the Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin, W, Four Points by Sheraton, Le Méridien, and aloft.

The hotel industry is highly competitive. Customer choices are generally based on quality and consistency of room, restaurant and meeting facilities and services, attractiveness of locations, availability of a global distribution system, price, the ability to earn and redeem loyalty program points and other factors. 

Starwood management believes that brand strength is among the most important factors contributing to its position as a leader in the lodging and vacation ownership industry and provides a foundation for the company’s business strategy. Key to the firm’s brand strength is the success of its upscale and luxury brands in capturing market share from competitors by aggressively cultivat...