Abstract
Hotel bookings are increasingly made online, and many travelers rely on eWOM in the form of peer hotel reviews. These reviews potentially contain information of great relevance to the tourism industry and offer a unique and ever-expanding corpus of unsolicited data. If these data are investigated systematically, it may provide insights that would enable hotel managers to be proactive in their marketing. The present study focuses on the underresearched area of the potential impact of nationality on the reviews. Using a corpus of authentic American and German hotel reviews and the qualitative, phenomenologically inspired method of systematic text condensation, this study investigates the impact of national culture on review comments in order to establish whether nationality makes a difference for the themes and attitudes expressed. The data indicate that Americans are more likely to focus on old-world charm, romance, physical comfort, personal service/relations, and problemsolving than are Germans. The overall results of this qualitative study allow us to conclude that there are indeed differences between the German and the American reviews to a degree that is worth pursuing in future mixed-methods research and that may have practice implications for hotel managers.
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