This study examines the relationship between distance measures and a Portuguese data set consisting of 34,622 online hotel reviews extracted from Booking.com and TripAdvisor written in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Based on the country of origin of each review author, a geographic and a psychic distance measure is calculated for Portugal. Data and text mining analysis provides additional insights into online hotel ratings. The authors confirm that online travelers’ evaluations are multifaceted constructs displaying varying patterns of rating behavior among the traveler base. By investigating the contemporary relevance of geographic and psychic distance, a key finding of this study is that travelers with less distance both in terms of psychic and geographic distance give a lower rating score than travelers with greater distance. The inclusion of psychic and geographic distance is advocated as a salient aspect for future researchers and for those practitioners who wish to enhance hotel product and service features.

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Hotels,Geographic distance,Psychic distance,Text mining,Online hotel ratings

• Civil Engineering - Engineering and Technology
• Economics and Business - Social Sciences
• Social and Economic Geography - Social Sciences
• Other Social Sciences - Social Sciences

This publication is an output of the following project(s):

• Analysis and Mitigation of crosstalk Effects in multicore fibre -based Networks