Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.47960/2831-0322.2026.1.30.30
Cultural Moderation of Online Hotel Evaluations: A Multilevel Model of Service Attribute Salience, Weighting, and Sentiment
Kenan Mahmutović
; Faculty of Economics, University of Bihać
Abstract
The present study aims to investigate whether online hotel ratings can be seen as a culturally invariant measure of service performance or a culturally variant measure of an evaluative outcome. Using 346,463 multilingual reviews from Booking.com for 794 hotels in Croatia, we propose a fully moderated multilevel model that includes the effects of cultural region, 26 dimensions of service quality based on BERTopic modeling, and the interaction between sentiment and culture. Our results demonstrate the presence of systematic differences in the evaluation process. First, we find that rating levels vary significantly by cultural region after controlling for hotel-level heterogeneity. Second, all 26 dimensions of service quality exhibit at least one significant difference by culture. Third, we observe that the effects of service-quality dimensions vary by culture. Finally, we observe that the sentiment exhibits strong asymmetric shifts and significant heterogeneity in the translation of affect. Importantly, the model exhibits substantially improved performance with the addition of the cultural moderation effect (marginal R² = .477; conditional R² = .537). Our results support the notion of a three-layered cultural filter in the evaluation of digital reputation.
Keywords
hotel review; cultural moderation; hospitality marketing; booking; sentiment analysis; service quality; customer behavior
Hrčak ID:
352289
URI
Publication date:
17.9.2026.
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