Two studies, two continents, one problem. In October 2026, HUME Research analysed the language of 100 Croatian coastal hotels: 1,003 texts, nearly 118,000 words across Croatian, English and German. Five years earlier, a corpus study of five-star hotels in China examined how the country’s luxury properties describe themselves in English. The samples could not be more different. The findings are almost identical. Hotels everywhere are writing in the same empty superlatives, and both studies quietly point to the same way out.
The shared sisease: evaluation eithout evidence
HUME found that of evaluative sentences, only about a third carried concrete support, a named product, dish or feature, in the same breath.
Croatian hotels lean on “savršeno,” “nezaboravno,” “jedinstveno,” perfect, unforgettable, unique, and on vague anchors like “lokalno,” “tradicionalno,” “mediteransko,” local, traditional, mediterranean. The words assert quality. They rarely prove it. The China study found the mirror image in a different vocabulary: its most common words were “luxury” (192 times), “elegant” (147), “perfect” (72), “ideal” (96), “best” (64), with evaluation making up the overwhelming share of all descriptive language. Both studies reach the same verdict. The adjective does the talking, and nothing stands behind it.
Same gap, different costume
The vocabularies diverge in a telling way. China’s five-star hotels sell status: luxury, elegance, prestige, the view. Croatian hotels sell warmth and place: family time, sea view, local and traditional food. One reaches for the aspirational, the other for the familiar. But the underlying failure is the same. Strip the status words or the warmth words away and neither leaves the reader with anything specific enough to picture, or to tell one hotel from the next. The HUME study is blunt about the fix: copy only becomes distinctive when it links a place, an action and evidence. Name the grape, the terrace, the market, the dish. Without that, “local” and “unforgettable” are noise in any language.
The missing person
Here is the most striking convergence. In the China study, language about people and service, the staff, the welcome, made up just 1.47% of all evaluative content, and the authors’ first recommendation was to put staff back into the writing. HUME found the human barely present too: touch and texture almost absent, and its proposed next step is to study how hotels describe staff, welcome and attentiveness, because right now they mostly do not. Two independent studies, a decade and a continent apart, both noticed the same hole. Hospitality is a people business that writes as if no people work there.
The takeaway
This is the JadeWolf findings shared by Tomas Backlund on our stage last year, arriving now from academic corpus linguistics instead of a branding study: most hotels score poorly on the clarity of their story, and they do it everywhere, in every language. The hotels that stand out are not the ones with more adjectives. They are the ones that name things, and that let the people who deliver the stay appear in the words that sell it. That is one of the conversations we are bringing to Best Stay 2027, 18-19 February, Sheraton Zagreb.
Photo credists: Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI)