Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Abstract

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers' personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede's framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Measuring service quality from unstructured data: A topic modeling application on airline passengers’ online reviews

“…Extant studies in this stream explore, among others, consumer motivation to participate on eWOM (Tong, Wang, Tan, & Teo, 2013), review characteristics that affect the credibility of eWOM (Luo, Luo, Xu, Warkentin, & Sia, 2015) or their helpfulness (Korfiatis, García-Barriocanal, & Sánchez-Alonso, 2012;Krishnamoorthy, 2015;Ngo-Ye, Sinha, & Sen, 2017). However, the pertinent question on how firms can utilize the information content of online reviews is focused on either extracting information that reflects customer preferences in order to improve their products (Law, Gruss, & Abrahams, 2017;Zhang, Xu, & Wan, 2012) or understand the demographic or cultural characteristics of their clients (Stamolampros, Korfiatis, Kourouthanassis, & Symitsi, 2018).…”

A Text Analytics-Based Importance Performance Analysis and Its Application to Airline Service

“…To counter this weakness, online reviews have been recognized as a recent data source worthwhile to exploit. Various studies using reviews have demonstrated their value and usefulness in related research [14,17,25,26,41,45,52]. Online reviews are easily gathered with big data in real-time [22].…”

“…The discovery of airport passenger satisfaction is crucial information for airport managers. Stamolampros, Korfiatis, Kourouthanassis, and Symitsi [26] explored the cultural influences implied in online reviews and ratings through topic modeling. According to the results of their study, customers were more likely to be satisfied because providers recognized the specific level of cultural influences.…”

“…TripAdvisor has been one of the most well-known travel review sites in which customers post their travel experiences regarding hospitality services [15,23]. There are many published results of text-analytics techniques working with the reviews provided in TripAdvisor for service quality and satisfaction [22,[24][25][26]. Liau and Tan [24] tried to describe passenger perceptions by conducting a sentiment analysis, a popular text analytics approach, and a clustering method.…”

Analyzing the Online Reputation and Positioning of Airlines

“…From the perspective of quantitative research, online customer ratings have been used preferentially on the specialized websites of TripAdvisor, Booking, and HolidayCheck [25,[38][39][40][41]. However, in the airline sector, research has been limited, especially in the statistical analysis of the scales and competitive positioning studies [42][43][44].…”