Abstract
The advent and development of digital platforms has helped enhance the international visibility of brands, products and services, and has also introduced a proliferation of online reviews. This study develops a big data analysis of customer online reviews of hospitality services to gauge the extent to which the cultural distance among service providers and their customers influences online review ratings. By examining almost 715,000 online reviews written by hotel customers from more than 100 different nationalities, the effect of national cultural differences among service customers and providers (namely cultural distance) on online review ratings is innovatively scrutinized. The paper, by considering reviewers’ behavioral features, demographics, and trip-related factors, reveals that the effect of national cultural distance on online review ratings is negative. Several implications for practitioners are also discussed.
Highlights
In recent years, electronic word-of-mouth recommendations in the guise of online consumer reviews have recorded an exponential growth
We opted for a multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) over a logistic model (Harrell 2015) as, unlike the ratings on TripAdvisor, the ratings on Booking.com assume a very high number of possible values between 2.5 and 10.0, being the result of the average of the ratings given on the different attributes that are based on the specific Booking.com rating system (Mariani and Borghi 2018; Mellinas et al 2015)
I.e. the online rating (Rating) given by the international hospitality service customer c to the hospitality service provider p was regressed against the independent variables: cultural distance, observed average rating (Obs_Avg_Rating) and control variables such as the reviewer’s demographics, behavioral features, as well as factors pertaining to the trip
Summary
Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) recommendations in the guise of online consumer reviews have recorded an exponential growth. As a result of the advent and consolidation of digital technologies, international tourists have more opportunities than ever to interrelate with people from different nations who display distinctively diverse cultural backgrounds online before, during and after their online purchases (Mariani et al 2019a). For this reason, cultural distance among service providers and service customers plays apparently a considerable and complex role in the online environment. One group of studies (Liu et al 2017; Mariani et al 2019a; Schuckert et al 2015b) investigates the effects of language used for reviewing purposes on online consumer behaviors and ratings after the hospitality service encounters.
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