Guest satisfaction in East and West: evidence from online reviews of the influence of cultural origin in two major gambling cities, Las Vegas and Macau

Abstract

We assess how cultural differences between guests and host destination affect the TripAdvisor score granted on hotel units. We selected two gambling destinations, Las Vegas and Macau, to enable a comparison between a Western and an Eastern destination. The six Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation, indulgence) were adopted. A total of 109,309 and 28,957 useful reviews for Las Vegas and Macau, respectively, were collected from TripAdvisor. Then, for each online reviewer, the difference between the reviewer’s country of origin and the destination for each dimension were computed. Finally, two data mining models (one per destination) of TripAdvisor score were computed using as inputs the differences for each dimension. We conclude that the difference between guest origin and destination cultural dimension influences the scores granted on TripAdvisor. We also found that the relevance of each dimension is different for both destinations analysed.