Authors Ashish ShrikantDepartment of Artificial Intelligence & Data Science, Nutan Maharashtra Institute of Engineering and Technology (NMIET), Maharashtra, India Abstract The rapid growth of online hotel booking platforms has generated a vast amount of customer reviews that contain valuable insights into guest satisfaction, service quality, and overall hospitality experiences. However, manually analyzing these unstructured textual reviews is time-consuming, inconsistent, and incapable of processing large-scale data efficiently. This research proposes a hybrid machine learning and BERT-based approach for sentiment and emotion analysis of hotel reviews to automatically identify customer opinions and emotional expressions with high accuracy. The proposed framework integrates Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques with traditional machine learning algorithms and transformer-based deep learning models to perform comprehensive review analysis. Initially, the collected hotel reviews undergo preprocessing steps including text normalization, tokenization, stop-word removal, punctuation cleaning, and lemmatization to improve text quality. Feature extraction is performed using TF-IDF and contextual word embeddings generated by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The sentiment classification module employs hybrid learning models comprising Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and BERT-based classifiers to categorize reviews into positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. Simultaneously, the emotion analysis module identifies emotional states such as happiness, satisfaction, sadness, anger, frustration, and surprise expressed by customers. Furthermore, aspect-based sentiment analysis is incorporated to evaluate customer opinions regarding hotel attributes including staff behavior, cleanliness, room quality, food services, pricing, and amenities. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the hybrid BERT-based framework significantly improves classification accuracy, contextual understanding, and emotion recognition compared with conventional machine learning methods. The proposed system effectively transforms large volumes of unstructured customer feedback into meaningful business intelligence, enabling hotel managers to monitor service quality, detect customer dissatisfaction at an early stage, enhance guest experiences, and support data-driven decision-making for continuous service improvement. Keywords Natural Language Processing (NLP) Sentiment Analysis Emotion Analysis Hotel Reviews Machine Learning BERT Transformer Model Support Vector Machine (SVM) Random Forest Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Text Mining Deep Learning Opinion Mining Customer Experience Analytics Hospitality Analytics. Citation of this Article Ashish Shrikant. (2026). 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