Guests’ Aesthetic experience with lifestyle hotels: An application of LDA topic modelling analysis

The purpose of this study is to systematically explore lifestyle hotel guests' aesthetic experiences. This study adopts word frequency analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modelling analysis and manual coding to systematically analyse 11,239 online reviews posted by guests from 131 lifestyle hotels in eight cities in China. A framework is developed to organize the identified themes and illustrate lifestyle hotel guests' aesthetic experiences. The framework revealed that lifestyle hotels embrace the concept of "bleisure" travel-blending business and leisure by offering high-end lodging, flexible tourism destination elements, and event services that cater to the needs of today's independent guests. The findings suggest that lifestyle hotel guests stress multiple functions of a hotel, especially the spiritual. Guided by the aesthetic experience at lifestyle hotels, hotel managers can cater to the full spectrum of hotel guests' aesthetic experience when implementing marketing strategies.