Decoding Hotel Ratings: A Cultural and Developmental Lens on Traveler Behavior

Using a large dataset of 545,000 reviews from 27,000 hotels, this study investigates how travelers’ nationalities influence hotel review ratings and their relationship with cultural dimensions and human development indicators. The presented analysis shows that hotel ratings can serve as predictors of components of the Human Development Index, with the Education Index showing the strongest association (adjusted R2 is 42.6%). The predictive power of hotel ratings was also compared to Hofstede’s dimensions in the context of predicting Human Development Index components. In terms of Hofstede’s dimensions we discovered that ”Individualism vs Collectivism” and ”Long-Term Orientation” dimensions exhibit the strongest associations with hotel ratings (adjusted R2 is 44.9% and 30.1% correspondingly), though the study’s focus on European hotels may limit generalizability. In terms of rating patterns, English-speaking countries and Israel use narrower score ranges with higher means (8.66±1.46), while predominantly Muslim countries employ wider ranges, resulting in lower means (7.96 ± 1.79). European and Asian countries generally fall between these extremes. The paper concludes with practical implications of the presented findings to the tourist recommender systems.