Fusing hotel ratings and reviews with hesitant terms and consensus measures

People have come to refer to reviews for valuable information on products before making a purchase. Digesting relevant opinions regarding a product by reading all the reviews is challenging. An automated methodology which aggregates opinions across all the reviews for a single product to help differentiate any two products having the same overall rating is defined. In order to facilitate this process, rating values, which capture the overall satisfaction, and written reviews, which contain the sentiment of the experience with a product, are fused together. In this manner, each reviewer's opinion is expressed as an interval rating by means of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets. These new expressions of opinion are then aggregated and expressed in terms of a central opinion and degree of consensus representing the agreement among the sentiment of the reviewers for an individual product. A real case example based on 2506 TripAdvisor reviews of hotels in Rome during 2017 is provided. The efficiency of the proposed methodology when discriminating between two hotels is compared with the TripAdvisor rating and median of reviews. The proposed methodology obtains significant differentiation between product rankings.