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Does culture affect sentiments expressed in cruise tours’ eWOM?

ABSTRACT The study aims to examine the sentiment differences in the content of cruise tour online reviews across North Americans and Europeans, as representing the two largest cruise markets. Dictionary-based sentiment analysis has been carried out on 1127 reviews on guided tours retrieved from TripAdvisor. The results indicate significant differences in the sentiment score of the reviews, with North Americans’ texts being more emotionally charged than the European ones. In addition, North Americans’ reviews conveyed a more positive affect and had a more subjective and intimate tone, while those written by Europeans contained a smaller amount of sentiment-bearing words and their tone was more objective. The study’s contribution lies in (i) providing evidence for the influence of culture on electronic word-of-mouth communication in terms of varying sentiment expression, (ii) demonstrating the effectiveness of sentiment analysis for recognizing cultural differences and (iii) enhancing the current understanding of cruisers’ tour experience.