Thanks to the advancement of Web technology, business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer, and business-to-business marketing communications have undergone changes in the modern period (Liu in The SAGE Handbook of Digital Marketing. 55 City Road, 2022). Since text, voice, and video-based social media were introduced, eWOM has increased dramatically. eWOM communication goes beyond “words” (Wu in Journal of Business Research 141:299–307, 2022) and (Wang in Tourism Management 96, 2023) research focuses on how people’s perceptions of eWOM are influenced by emojis with varying meanings. In order to predict both good and negative ratings for helpfulness, this study investigates the function of service qualities and the moderating role of service category. This study uses regression analysis with a sample of 1.668 negative online reviews and 12.227 favorable online reviews, in a total of 13.895, of hotels on Booking.com in a special region of the world, the Douro Valley. Based on all hotel units in the Douro area of northern Portugal, ranging in hotel star-rating from one to five. The findings indicate that certain product characteristics covered in customer reviews play a significant role in determining how beneficial customer reviews linked to high ratings are. The results also point to the service category—that is, hotel star-rating—as a mitigating factor in the association between hotel features and extreme ratings helpfulness. The significance of service characteristics and categorization in assessing positive and negative ratings helpfulness is emphasized by this study. Implications for theory and management are examined. This study fills a vacuum about online reviews and comments on wine-related businesses by providing a more thorough analysis of the customer experience associated with the service classification.