Understanding consumers’ emotions in relation to hotel attributes has gained more importance in the tourism industry for perceiving their specific needs and evaluations. This study aims to explore the differential impact of hotel attributes on six emotions – anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, which were identified from a review of hotel literature. The polarity of evaluation on each hotel attribute and emotional variable were measured using transfer learning-based models to overcome the issues of a dictionary-based approach. We found the hotel attributes’ polarity negatively affects a negative emotion or positively affects a positive emotion, the impact sizes of the hotel attributes were different from each other. The main emotional responses to value, food quality, or check-in service were joy or anger, which can guide hotel managers when developing marketing strategies.