  Since culture influences expectations, perceptions, and satisfaction, a
cross-culture study is necessary to understand the differences between Japan's
biggest tourist populations, Chinese and Western tourists. However, with
ever-increasing customer populations, this is hard to accomplish without
extensive customer base studies. There is a need for an automated method for
identifying these expectations at a large scale. For this, we used a
data-driven approach to our analysis. Our study analyzed their satisfaction
factors comparing soft attributes, such as service, with hard attributes, such
as location and facilities, and studied different price ranges. We collected
hotel reviews and extracted keywords to classify the sentiment of sentences
with an SVC. We then used dependency parsing and part-of-speech tagging to
extract nouns tied to positive adjectives. We found that Chinese tourists
consider room quality more than hospitality, whereas Westerners are delighted
more by staff behavior. Furthermore, the lack of a Chinese-friendly environment
for Chinese customers and cigarette smell for Western ones can be disappointing
factors of their stay. As one of the first studies in the tourism field to use
the high-standard Japanese hospitality environment for this analysis, our
cross-cultural study contributes to both the theoretical understanding of
satisfaction and suggests practical applications and strategies for hotel
managers.
