‘‘SENTIMENT-BASED EVALUATION OF TOURIST EXPERIENCES FROM ONLINE REVIEWS’’
Main Article Content
Abstract
Online reviews offer tourists additional user-generated data to assess tourist satisfaction and determine what factors impact the tourism experience. A study analysed tourists' experiences by sentiment analysis comprising 20,491 TripAdvisor hotel reviews. Secondary data and a quantitative and cross-sectional design were used. Review texts were cleaned and processed using natural language processing and text-mining techniques. The polarity scores in TextBlob were used to determine the sentiment of the reviews such as positive, neutral, and negative sentiment and relationships between textual sentiment and customer ratings were explored using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, chi-square testing, one-way analysis of variance, keyword analysis, and graphical visualisation. The outcome revealed that 86.15% of the reviews were positive, 10.77% were neutral and 3.08% were negative. The combination of four and five stars accounted for 73.66% of the total number of observations. Sentiment polarity was also significantly and positively correlated with customer ratings (r = 0.647, p < 0.001), and significant differences in polarity were found between the categories of ratings. The main dimensions that influenced tourists' experiences were room conditions, staff behaviour, food and breakfast, location, cleanliness, comfort, service quality, and value for money. The results show that the inclusion of the numerical ratings and the textual sentiment gives a more holistic measure of satisfaction compared to using one measure individually. Through sentiment-based review analytics, hotel management can identify strengths in their services, unearth recurring issues, enhance customer experiences, and aid in evidence-based hospitality decisions.
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