How Croatia’s four-star and five-star coastal hotels describe their value
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Across Croatian, English and German, hotel texts invite guests to imagine, taste and discover. An analysis of 117,891 words from the official websites of 98 hotels shows what this language promises, where it follows a shared pattern and where it becomes specific to a region or hotel category.
Scope: 1,003 texts from the websites of 98 of the 100 Croatian coastal hotels studied. These are four-star and five-star hotels with at least 50 accommodation units. The texts cover hotel descriptions, destinations and gastronomy.
A shared language of the stay: scene, place, table, action and outcome
Hotel communication across the three languages shares an experiential core with five layers:
- Scene: sea views, beaches, pine forests, sunsets.
- Place: historic centres, heritage, protected nature, named landmarks.
- Table: local and seasonal ingredients, fish, wine, olive oil.
- Action: discover, explore, taste, enjoy.
- Outcome: relaxation, memories, family time, gastronomic experiences.
Gastronomy texts have the most imperatives and experiential verbs in all three languages. The shared experiential core remains stable after additional copies of identical texts are removed.
How many hotels name local specialties?
At least one of 16 selected local gastronomic specialties, from truffles to Dingač, is named by 25 of 98 hotels: 19 in gastronomy texts and six only in hotel descriptions or destination texts. The strongest regional contrast is between Istria and Central Dalmatia.
Share of hotels naming at least one of the 16 selected specialties (%)
| Region | Hotels naming a specialty | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Istria | 9 of 19 | 47.4% |
| Central Dalmatia | 1 of 30 | 3.3% |
Four of the nine Istrian hotels mention a marker only in the same shared text, so the number of hotels is not the number of independent editorial decisions. The figures describe visibility on hotel websites, rather than the actual offer.
What do four-star and five-star hotels emphasize?
Related phrases · occurrences per 1,000 words
Five-star hotels more often describe gastronomy as a journey or an experience: these expressions occur 2.23 times per 1,000 words, compared with 0.63 in four-star hotels.
Share of hotels using expressions about family holidays (%)
Four-star hotels more often emphasize local products, national parks and family holidays. These differences are descriptive and do not establish an effect on guests.
Taste, sight and movement: sensory language
Taste dominates gastronomy texts, sight dominates hotel descriptions, and movement dominates destination texts. Touch and texture are rare in the selected dictionary: 0.25 occurrences per 1,000 words in gastronomy, 0.26 in hotel descriptions and 0.08 in destination texts.
“Perfect”, “unforgettable”, “unique”: when a word has a concrete anchor
“Perfect”, “unforgettable” and “unique” are evaluative expressions. A concrete anchor is a specific detail about what the hotel offers, stated in the same sentence as such an expression.
A text search using a predefined word list and rules identified a concrete anchor in 29.7% of these sentences in gastronomy texts and 38.9% in hotel descriptions.
Share of extracted evaluative sentences with an identified concrete anchor (%)
The percentages show the anchors identified by the search under these rules. Further reading can reveal additional anchors. Details of the check are provided in the full report.
The HUME perspective
The official website is a channel over which the hotel has substantial editorial control. Guests may arrive with expectations shaped by recommendations, reviews, social media, AI recommendations or previous stays. According to the expectation-disconfirmation model, satisfaction also depends on comparing the experience with what was expected (Oliver, 1980). Psychological distance offers a framework for understanding how guests imagine a future stay: a more distant experience may be represented more abstractly, while a nearer one may be represented through more concrete details (Trope and Liberman, 2010). Promises of family time and gastronomic journeys suggest different criteria for a successful stay. This study does not measure guest responses. The next step is to examine how closely guests’ evaluations follow the value emphasized in hotel texts, and how staff decisions relate to that value.
How to read the findings
Hotel texts across the three languages create a similar picture of a desirable stay. Regional differences and differences by star category reveal which values hotels emphasize more often and which details they include in their descriptions.
The figures show two aspects of these emphases. Occurrences per 1,000 words indicate how often particular expressions are used in the texts. The share of hotels indicates how many use them at least once. An expression can therefore occur frequently in texts from a small number of hotels, or be widespread among many hotels that mention it only once.
The findings describe what hotels make visible on their websites. Their actual offer may include specialties that the text does not name. How guests recognize the value emphasized and experience it during their stay remains a question for research into guest experiences.
The report includes analysis across all categories, tables by language, eight charts, a conclusion and full methodological notes with sources.
Maričić, I. (2026). The language of hotel promises. HUME Research.
