From blocks to bookings: How blockchain lifts customer satisfaction and hotel performance using textual analytics and panel evidence from hotels

This study investigates how blockchain adoption influences customer satisfaction and hotel performance, and how industry conditions shape this relationship. Using a panel of 7208 firm–year observations from FTSE 350 listed UK hotel companies (2018–2024), we develop a Blockchain Adoption Index (BAI) based on textual analysis of corporate disclosures. The index captures adoption intensity through keyword frequency, TF–IDF weighting, and contextual validation. Hotel performance is measured using RevPAR, with ADR and occupancy as robustness checks, while customer satisfaction is proxied by the British Customer Satisfaction Index. Employing a two-step system GMM estimator, the results show that blockchain adoption significantly improves both customer satisfaction and performance, with satisfaction partially mediating this effect. The impact is stronger under higher dynamism, complexity, and munificence. Overall, the findings provide hospitality-specific evidence of a dynamic capabilities-based mechanism linking blockchain adoption to performance, while highlighting important contextual contingencies. • Introduces a novel Blockchain Adoption Index (BAI) using textual analytics. • Shows blockchain adoption enhances both hotel performance and satisfaction. • Identifies customer satisfaction as a key mediator of blockchain’s value creation. • Reveals stronger performance effects in dynamic, complex, and munificent contexts.