Dr Sourya Rongala, Assistant Professor, Department of Management, in collaboration with Dr Vinay Chittiprolu, Assistant Professor at IMT Nagpur, has published the research paper titled “Blending Work and Fun: Extracting the Bleisure Experiences from Indian Heritage Hotels,” in Unveiling Bleisure Travellers: Exploring Novel Dimensions for Enriching Social Consumer Engagement Using Big Data Analytics (2025) in Emerald Publishing Limited.
The growing convergence of business and leisure travel has given rise to “bleisure” tourism as an important segment within the hospitality industry. This study explores the experiences of bleisure travellers staying in Indian heritage hotels by analysing large-scale user-generated content. Using big data analytics to examine online reviews, the research identifies key attributes contributing to traveller satisfaction and dissatisfaction, offering actionable insights for heritage hoteliers to enhance service quality and guest experiences.
This paper tried to understand the satisfaction and dissatisfaction attributes of bleisure travellers during their stay in Indian heritage hotels. Around 6000 reviews posted by business customers who had stayed in 35 indian heritage hotels along with their families, were analysed. Post analysis results indicated that majority of the travellers had a positive
experience and they were satisfied owing to leisure attributes like Property and Architecture, Nostalgia, Menu, Food, Pool; Amenities, Recommend to Visit, Staff Behaviour; Service, Stay Experience, Spacious Bathroom and Food Pricing. However there was a mild dissatisfaction among the travellers. Travellers onioned that aspects like Billing; Reservations and Convention space across these hotels can be improved further.
Brief Abstract:
Business travelers spending some leisure time during their business trip is not a new phenomenon, but this aspect has grasped the attention of tourism practitioners in recent times owing to its consistent economic returns. Both hoteliers and destination managers are focusing on this segment of business travelers aspiring to have vivid leisure experiences too as a part of their business trip and have segmented them as “bleisure travelers”. This scenario opened a lucrative and challenging market to hoteliers and travel companies pushing them to create unique service offerings to this segment. Handling bleisure travelers can be challenging owing to the dual faced travel motive. For example, a bleisure traveler may have to attend a meeting for a whole day but doesn’t want his family to miss out on the fun and excitement keeping them idle. These kinds of tricky instances put a lot of weight on the hoteliers and travel companies as they need to plan and deliver satisfactory experiences to the entire bleisure travel group. Exclusive study indicating satisfactory and dissatisfactory attributes of bleisure travelers is sparse till date. Current study tried to contribute to the literature by narrowing down the satisfactory and dissatisfactory attributes pertaining to bleisure travelers. 6000 reviews of 35 Indian heritage were extracted from Tripadvisor. Reviews were scrapped using python. Data was analyzed using LDA. Findings of this study indicate major implications for the hoteliers to improve and customize their service offerings.
Practical implementation of the research:
Even though Indian heritage hotels show a bright picture promising superior service delivery, there are minor setbacks that cannot be ignored. Firstly, heritage properties even though they are redesigned with elegance and excellence, age of the property is old. Making it mandatory for regular maintenance, and upgradation considering the latest needs. Secondly, service issues regarding Billing and Reservation are mostly alarming in top tier hotels. Hoteliers can adhere to two different mechanisms for executive booking and personal booking to curtail this problem.
Collaborations:
This paper is worked with collaboration with Dr Vinay Chittiprolu, Assistant Professor at IMT Nagpur.
Future research plans:
- Exploring the experiences of travellers visiting UNESCO Caves in India through UGC.
- Perceived safety and its effect on travel experiences of solo women travellers.
- Food Neophobia and its effect on consumption intentions towards insect based protein among Gen Z’s.
