Same sushi, different impressions: a cross-cultural analysis of Yelp reviews

Makoto Nakayama () and Yun Wan
Additional contact information
Makoto Nakayama: DePaul University

Information Technology & Tourism, 2019, vol. 21, issue 2, No 3, 207 pages

Abstract: Abstract Online reviews are essential digital assets for any service business in the hospitality industry. This study analyzes 76,704 Western (North American and European) and 56,159 Japanese Yelp reviews of Japanese restaurants. We find that Western consumers are more likely to give higher or lower star ratings than are Japanese consumers, while Japanese consumers are more likely to vote on the helpfulness of others’ reviews than are Westerners. Further analyses of the review texts show that Western and Japanese consumers express their sentiments over different dimensions of restaurant experience (food quality, service quality, the physical environment, and price fairness) for the same categories of Japanese dish. Westerners express more sentiments on service quality overall; Japanese customers express more negative sentiments on inferior physical environments and more positive sentiments on price fairness. These findings indicate that culture influences the consumer experience expressed in online reviews. Our study thus offers insights into online travel portals and restaurant practitioners to help them use online reviews wisely and appropriately accommodate customers with varied cultural backgrounds.

Keywords: Online reviews; Text mining; Sentiment analysis; Restaurant valuation; Culinary valuation criteria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40558-018-0136-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infott:v:21:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s40558-018-0136-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ystems/journal/40558

DOI: 10.1007/s40558-018-0136-5

Access Statistics for this article

Information Technology & Tourism is currently edited by Zheng Xiang

More articles in Information Technology & Tourism from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().