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.

The influence of cultural origins of visitors when staying in the city that never sleeps

“…On the opposite, one might think that destinations largely exposed to intercultural exchange such as NYC may lead to lesser need to adapt to guests. As Moro (2020) found out, that is not the case, at least for the gambling American and Asian centers of Las Vegas and Macau, respectively. Indeed, guests' satisfaction varies depending on their cultural origins (de Carlos et al, 2019).…”

“…In contrast, we use a large sample of online reviews which are currently the most widely adopted method within tourism for guests to provide feedback within their stay at a destination. While the study by Moro (2020) unveiled that the cultural differences between guests and host destination result in different levels of satisfaction expressed in online reviews for the cities of Las Vegas and Macau, the specific context of both major gambling destinations does not allow to generalize the results to NYC, as the above cited author mentions in his study's limitations.…”

“…Culture has been examined in terms of how explicit manifestations of culture are related to the attractiveness of a city (Ferilli et al, 2015) as well as regarding travel motivations and desired activities within destinations (Rita et al, 2018;Moro, 2020). The antecedents of place attachment within the context of cultural tourism destinations were investigated by Hou et al (2005) who specifically examined tourists with different cultural backgrounds and found that the meaning and formation of attachment may differ depending on the ethnic background of tourists.…”

“…The fact that NYC is a cosmopolitan metropolis may raise important cultural issues for newcomers with origins in distinct cultural places. The cultural diversity of tourism industry employees can lead to different guests' perceptions about the same employee, depending on the guest's origin (Moro, 2020). This is widely acknowledged in existing literature focused on foreign labor in NYC (e.g., Bao, 2001;Kuba, 2019).…”

“…Additionally, most of the adopted approaches are based on data directly collected through questionnaires/surveys, limiting the number of responses and possible bias due to the difficulty in choosing a representative sample of the population (Moro, 2020). In contrast, we use a large sample of online reviews which are currently the most widely adopted method within tourism for guests to provide feedback within their stay at a destination.…”