How Hotels Can Decode Guest Sentiment at Scale Using SentimentAI

Nowadays, hotels collect a ton of guest feedback, often without even actively asking for it. Reviews, surveys, post-stay messages, social comments, in-stay feedback, and so on. While the volume certainly keeps growing, clarity over what the guests are saying, doesn’t.

In fact, the sheer amount of reviews, scattered across multiple channels makes it more difficult than ever to manually categorize the reviews, understand the guest’s sentiments towards the hotel and their experience, gather insights you can act on, and make sense of the whole picture. 

For this reason, most teams still rely on surface-level metrics like average scores or star ratings. Useful, yes… but limited. A 4.2 rating doesn’t explain what actually delighted guests, what frustrated them, or what will hurt bookings next quarter if nothing changes.

That gap between data and decision-making is where many hospitality teams get stuck. They have feedback, but not direction. Information, but no prioritization.

SentimentAI changes that. It transforms unstructured guest comments into structured, prioritized insights, revealing the why behind guest sentiment and shows what truly impacts satisfaction. With this information, teams can understand reviews at scale and use them to drive positive changes.

What is SentimentAI?

A feature included in TrustYou’s Customer Experience Platform, SentimentAI is an advanced semantic analysis engine built specifically for hospitality.

At its core, it analyzes what guests say, how they feel and exactly what they are referring to. Every piece of feedback is broken down into clear components that are structured:

• The text itself, what the guest actually wrote;
• The sentiment behind it: positive, negative or neutral;
• The subcategory it relates to, such as Room Cleanliness, Breakfast Quality, Front Desk Friendliness, etc.

So, instead of treating feedback as long paragraphs of text, SentimentAI converts opinions into organized data that can be easily filtered and compared, to drive decisions and priorities.

It works across more than 700 semantic categories and subcategories and currently supports 23 languages. What’s more, it analyzes feedback in the original language that it was written to preserve its true meaning.

SentimentAI Capabilities Deep Semantic Understanding

Since this CXP feature understands context, it goes far beyond keyword detection. So, when a guest expresses that, for instance, “the room was spotless but the bathroom felt dated,” the system correctly identifies two separate opinions, links them to different subcategories, and assigns distinct sentiment to each.

This level of semantic understanding allows hotels to see feedback the way guests actually experience it: not as isolated words but as meaningful opinions.

700+ Categories and Subcategories

The AI-powered feature structures feedback using a robust semantic framework that our teams at TrustYou have built specifically for hospitality.

Subcategories follow a MECE principle, meaning they are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Simply put, each opinion fits clearly into one place without overlap or confusion.

These subcategories cover:

• Physical spaces including rooms, bathrooms, bars, and public areas;
• Tangible elements such as breakfast, furniture, TV, or amenities;
• Services including housekeeping, shuttle service and loyalty programs;
• Staff roles like front office or wellness teams;
• Practices such as cleanliness standards or sustainability;
• Qualities like comfort, availability, size, or value for money.

Category, Department, and Drill-Down Analysis

SentimentAI allows analysis at multiple levels. Meaning, teams can start high-level by reviewing categories such as Room, Food and Beverage, or Cleanliness. From there, they can drill down into precise subcategories like Room Cleanliness, Breakfast Variety, or Staff Friendliness.

Departments add another layer of operational clarity, so feedback can be grouped by functional areas including housekeeping, maintenance, front desk, food and beverage, wellness and spa, and more.

This makes it easy for each team to focus on what is relevant to them without losing the bigger picture.

Multi-Language Analysis Without Translation Loss

Guest sentiment often gets distorted when translated.

SentimentAI avoids that problem by analyzing feedback in its original language. Whether a review is written in Spanish, German, Japanese, or Arabic, the system interprets sentiment natively.

With support for 23 languages, global and multi-property brands get consistent insight across regions without sacrificing accuracy.

Pattern Detection Across Properties

Because one isolated complaint rarely tells the full story, the SentimentAI tool was built to automatically identify recurring patterns across time, channels and properties. It highlights whether an issue is a one-off incident or a growing trend that needs immediate attention.

This is especially critical for multi-property and enterprise groups that need visibility at both brand and property level.

Impact Scores That Show What Truly Matters

Needless to say, not all issues affect guest satisfaction equally; which is why SentimentAI connects sentiment with Impact Scores, revealing which experience factors have the strongest influence on overall satisfaction and loyalty.

This way, teams can stop reacting to noise and focus on what actually moves the needle. For example, if breakfast variety has a higher impact on satisfaction than lobby decor, the data will make that clear. 

Continuously Improving Through Human Fine-Tuning

It’s key to note that the tool improves continuously through human review and feedback. Through this refinement process, insights evolve as guest expectations change.

The AI-powered system learns over time, becoming sharper and more reliable with every interaction.

Why SentimentAI Matters for Hoteliers and Marketing Teams Know What Matters Most to Guests

SentimentAI enables hotels to automatically gain clarity on what truly matters to their guests due to the fact that it identifies which experience factors have the highest impact on satisfaction.

This helps teams avoid spending time on low-impact improvements while missing the issues that actually influence loyalty and reviews.

Act With Precision, Not Assumptions

SentimentAI replaces assumptions with evidence so that operational and marketing decisions don’t rely on instinct or anecdotal feedback. When sentiment and impact data are combined, teams know exactly where to focus investments and operational changes, thus making sure that every action has a clear rationale behind it.

Spot Issues Before They Hurt Reputation

Problems don’t tend to appear overnight but rather build up gradually, hidden inside comments long before they show up in your overall feedback scores. This CXP feature detects those early warning signs, allowing teams to intervene before issues escalate publicly.

That means fewer reputation surprises and faster response times.

Improve Resource Allocation

An absolute given in hospitality is that time and budget are always limited. So, SentimentAI highlights high-impact issues, helping hotels allocate resources where they deliver the greatest return. With it, teams can stop chasing every complaint and start focusing on what actually improves guest satisfaction.

Strengthen Marketing Messaging

Sentiment data reveals what travelers genuinely appreciate or dislike in their experiences as hotel guests. These insights can inform things like website messaging, campaign themes and even brand positioning based on real guest language. Authentic messaging performs better because it reflects reality.

Maintain Brand Consistency Across Properties

For hotel groups, consistency and keeping a unified voice is one of the hardest challenges.

But, with this feature, it’s easy to compare performance across locations and ensure brand standards are being met everywhere. Strong properties become benchmarks. Weaker ones get clear direction.

Gain Competitive Advantage

When combined with benchmarking, sentiment analysis shows how your guest experience compares to market leaders.

Hotels can identify strengths worth amplifying and gaps that competitors are already winning on. That insight directly supports smarter strategy and stronger positioning.

SentimentAI Within the TrustYou CX Platform

SentimentAI is not a standalone tool. In fact, as we mentioned above, it’s fully embedded within TrustYou’s Customer Experience Platform.

The CXP connects all the feedback you get from guests across channels, surveys, analytics, benchmarking, and much more in one unified environment. It gets rid of silos and helps teams avoid switching between platforms and endless website tabs.

Alongside SentimentAI, the platform includes several complementary capabilities. Let’s explore some of them:

SummaryAI

SummaryAI automatically condenses large volumes of guest feedback into clear, easy-to-read weekly summaries. Instead of scrolling through hundreds of comments, teams get an instant overview of key themes and factors like specific strengths or weaknesses.

In short, it saves time while keeping everyone informed and aligned.

InsightsAI

InsightsAI surfaces trends, anomalies and meaningful shifts in guest sentiment so teams can easily understand what is changing and where attention is needed.

This turns raw data into proactive intelligence.

Impact Scores

Impact Scores connect guest sentiment to business outcomes so that improvement efforts are always prioritized based on real impact.

How? They reveal which experience factors most strongly influence satisfaction and loyalty, as well as review performance.

Competitor Benchmarking

TrustYou’s CXP allows hotels to benchmark sentiment and performance against their competitive set. Going beyond score comparisons, hoteliers can see how they’re performing across specific experience categories compared to market leaders.

Together, these features create a complete feedback intelligence ecosystem that supports smarter decisions across the entire organization.

From Opinions to Impact with SentimentAI

At TrustYou, we created this tool to solve a simple but critical problem: the lack of clarity that hotels lack on their guest feedback.

By transforming unstructured guest opinions into structured, prioritized insight, SentimentAI helps hospitality teams understand what guests truly care about and invest where it matters most, faster. 

As part of TrustYou’s CXP, it fits naturally into daily workflows and turns guest feedback into a strategic asset rather than an operational burden.

If you want to move beyond scores, stop guessing and start making decisions driven by actual data, SentimentAI delivers the foundation.

Turn guest opinions into impact. Get a demo of SentimentAI.

About TrustYou

TrustYou is the #1 Hospitality AI platform. Since 2008, the company has supported hotels and hotel groups worldwide in turning guest feedback, customer data, and automated interactions into measurable results. The platform unifies three core products in one system:

At the core of TrustYouʼs platform are three powerful solutions:

• Customer Experience Platform CXP: Centralizes all reviews and surveys, applies AI-driven analysis, and automatically responds to feedback with ResponseAI. Hotels gain deeper insights into the guest experience, strengthen their online reputation, and make more informed service decisions.
• Customer Data Platform CDP: Consolidates all guest data into so-called Golden Profiles, integrates consent management, and enables precise audience segmentation. This powers personalized marketing campaigns, drives more direct bookings, and fosters long-term guest loyalty.
• AI Agents: Handle 100% of inbound communication—24/7, in any language, and across all channels. They deliver instant, context-aware responses, support upselling, and free up operational teams.

With TrustYou, hotels invest in a future-ready platform that makes the Always-Reply Future a reality: better guest experiences, more direct revenue, and more efficient operations. For more information please visit www.trustyou.com.

Contact:
TrustYou
Alisa Kellermann
[email protected]
www.trustyou.com