Does religion influence location choice in the hotel industry?

Relying on data from the Spanish hotel industry, this paper analyzes the role of informal institutional factors (IIF) in location choice. Earlier studies mostly use an aggregate level of cultural differences as informal institutional factors. We, however, go deeper into this concept and study the impact of two distinct but interrelated informal institutional factors, religion and language, on the location decisions of hotel chains. We resolve the overlapping problem between these two highly correlated IIF by means of a ‘layer’ measurement in Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Our results show that the higher the informal institutional differences (IID), the lower the presence of the hotels in the foreign country. While physical distance plays a key moderating role, formal institutional differences (FID) did not show any effect. We contribute by unravelling the role of language and religion in location choice in the internationalization process of service firms. Moreover, we test the moderating role of formal institutions in these decisions, thus combining the impact of formal and informal institutions on location choices in service firms.