Cited by 622Sentiment Analysis and Opinion MiningDiverse Aspects of Tourism ResearchDigital Marketing and Social Media

The DOI matches its Crossref record, with a small difference in title or year; 89 of the 89 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 14 of the 144 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

Sentiment Analysis in Tourism: Capitalizing on Big Data

Open access
Alaei, Ali Reza, Becken, Susanne, Stantic, Bela·2019·Journal of Travel Research

Abstract

Advances in technology have fundamentally changed how information is produced and consumed by all actors involved in tourism. Tourists can now access different sources of information, and they can generate their own content and share their views and experiences. Tourism content shared through social media has become a very influential information source that impacts tourism in terms of both reputation and performance. However, the volume of data on the Internet has reached a level that makes manual processing almost impossible, demanding new analytical approaches. Sentiment analysis is rapidly emerging as an automated process of examining semantic relationships and meaning in reviews. In this article, different sentiment analysis approaches applied in tourism are reviewed and assessed in terms of the datasets used and performances on key evaluation metrics. The article concludes by outlining future research avenues to further advance sentiment analysis in tourism as part of a broader Big Data approach.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This review examines sentiment analysis methods used in tourism, assesses their datasets and performance, and argues that sentiment analysis is an early step toward broader Big Data approaches in tourism research. It finds that machine learning and dictionary-based methods dominate, hotel/accommodation reviews are the most common data source, and multi-class or neutral sentiment detection remains difficult.

Key findings

  • Tourism sentiment studies rely heavily on hotel and accommodation reviews, with fewer studies on restaurants and airlines; common sources include TripAdvisor, Booking, Ctrip, and Twitter. Reported dataset sizes vary widely, from 479 Chinese hotel reviews in Zheng and Ye to 417,170 hotel reviews in Brob, and 10,000,000 tweets in Shimada et al. with 200,000 or 116 annotated items depending on the task.
  • Binary classification generally performs better than three-class classification. Examples include Zheng and Ye’s SVM on hotel reviews at 0.912 accuracy, Zhang et al.’s Naïve Bayes on restaurant reviews at 0.957 accuracy, and Shimada et al.’s Naïve Bayes on tourism information at 0.92 accuracy; three-class results are lower, such as Kasper and Vela at 0.81 accuracy, Schmunk et al. at 0.768, and Bucur at 0.72.
  • On the Sanders Twitter dataset, Levallois’s method gave the best binary results (accuracy 0.82, F-measure 0.82), while VADER gave the best multi-class results (accuracy 0.60, F-measure 0.58).
  • The review reports that machine learning approaches are most common, dictionary-based approaches are also frequent, and hybrid approaches are rare; domain-specific lexicons are seldom used, and neutral reviews are especially hard to detect.

Methods

  • The paper is a critical review of sentiment analysis in tourism. Studies were identified through Google keyword searches and by extracting tourism-related references from recent sentiment analysis reviews, rather than through a systematic Scopus or Web of Science search.
  • It provides a technical overview of sentiment analysis steps—data retrieval, extraction and selection, pre-processing, feature extraction, topic detection, and data mining—and categorizes methods as supervised machine learning, unsupervised machine learning, dictionary/rule-based, semantic, and hybrid.
  • It compares reported tourism studies using accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure, and additionally evaluates three Twitter-oriented methods on a publicly available Twitter dataset.

Limitations

  • Stated in the paper: results across tourism studies are not directly comparable because database sizes, numbers of classes, and data types differ; the search strategy was not a systematic database search; domain-specific lexicons are rarely used, which compromises quality; neutral reviews are difficult to detect; and hybrid methods have been used only in a few cases.
  • Stated in the paper: some dictionary-based tourism studies were restricted by small keyword sets or failure to handle negation, limiting their findings.
  • Evident from the text: many studies in the summary tables do not report key dataset or performance details, and the review does not conduct a meta-analysis or standardized re-evaluation of all included tourism methods.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/0047287517747753

Cites

89 of 89 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

27 No full text of the sources · 25 Not checked yet · 25 No basis given · 19 Sources not found · 13 Own interpretation · 5 Partly supported · 4 Supported · 2 Supported so far · 2 Couldn’t confirm · 1 Own result · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 39 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 73
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 26
84 of 84
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Tourism content shared through social media has become a very influential information source that impacts tourism in many ways.

    “Tourism content shared through social media has become a very influential information source that impacts tourism in many ways.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The volume of data on the Internet has reached a level that makes manual processing almost impossible, demanding new analytical approaches.

    “However, the volume of data on the Internet has reached a level that makes manual processing almost impossible, demanding new analytical approaches.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    In tourism, a service-based industry that relies on positive customer emotions and feedback, the concept of visitor satisfaction is of critical importance.

    “In the context of tourism, a service-based industry that relies on positive customer emotions and feedback, the concept of visitor satisfaction is of critical importance.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Online social media, travel professional websites and platforms, and blogs present inexpensive means to gather rich, authentic, and unsolicited data on travellers' opinions.

    “Importantly, online social media, travel professional websites and platforms, and blogs present inexpensive means to gather rich, authentic, and unsolicited data on travellers' opinions.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    To analyse large data volumes more effectively, the demand for automatic multi-aspect algorithmic and machine-operated systems is increasing.

    “To analyse large data volumes more effectively, the demand for automatic multi-aspect algorithmic and machine-operated systems is increasing.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Online data related to tourism activities are generated at such velocity that they outstrip the potential of traditional (paper and pen) surveys to capture events in real-time.

    “Online data related to tourism activities are generated at such velocity that they outstrip the potential of traditional (paper and pen) surveys to capture events in real-time in order, for example, to monitor service quality and recovery.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Twitter's 140-character limit makes it suitable for mostly sentence-level sentiment analysis.

    “Twitter, for instance, allows tweets of up to 140 characters in length, lending itself to a mostly sentence-level sentiment analysis.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Features derived based on a sentiment lexicon improve sentiment analysis results.

    “Features derived based on a sentiment lexicon improve sentiment analysis results.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The use of a simple Bag of Words representation for sentiment analysis provides less favourable results compared to traditional topic classification, as semantic information needs also to be modelled by BoW.

    “It has further been shown that the use of a simple Bag of Words (BoW) representation for sentiment analysis provides less favourable results compared to traditional topic classification, as in sentiment analysis, semantic information needs also to be modelled by BoW, which is a difficult task.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Considering higher order N-grams and complex linguistic features are helpful for polarity classification and can improve the results significantly.

    “Considering higher order N-grams and complex linguistic features are helpful for polarity classification and can improve the results significantly.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The use of higher order N-grams and complex linguistic features is beneficial when large corpora are available for training the models.

    “However, the use of higher order N-grams and complex linguistic features is beneficial when large corpora are available for training the models.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    When using smaller corpora, a feature selection step is necessary to obtain satisfactory sentiment analysis results.

    “When using smaller corpora, a feature selection step is necessary to obtain satisfactory sentiment analysis results.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Most travel agencies and hotel booking service providers employ scalar ratings to rate users' reviews, for example, scores between 1 and 5 stars.

    “In relation to the kind of data used for sentiment analysis in tourism, we noted that most of the travel agencies and hotel booking service providers employ scalar ratings to rate users' reviews, for example, scores between 1 and 5 stars.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    User-provided scores function as weakly labelled data, and can improve the classification accuracy, as well as help to verify polarity.

    “However, from an analytical perspective, the user-provided scores function as weakly labelled data, and can improve the classification accuracy, as well as help to verify polarity.”
14 of 14

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Show all 75 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Allan J., Carbonell J. G., Doddington G., Yamron J., Yang Y. 1998. “Topic Detection and Tracking Pilot Study Final Report.” In Proceedings of the Broadcast News Transcription and Understanding Workshop, 194-218. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufman.
  2. Chua A. Y. K., Banerjee S. 2013. “Reliability of Reviews on the Internet: The Case of TripAdvisor.” In Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science, 453-57. New York: Springer.
  3. Claster W. B., Dinh Q. H., Cooper M. 2010. “Naïve Bayes and Unsupervised Artificial Neural Nets for Cancun Tourism Social Media Data Analysis.” In Proceedings of the Second World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing, 158-63. New York: IEEE.
  4. Hepburn C. 2007. “Web 2.0 for the Tourism and Travel Industry: A White Paper.” ICT-Technical Reports Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism. http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/390.
  5. Hippner H., Rentzmann R. 2006. Text Mining. Ingolstadt: Springer-Verlag.
  6. Kasper W., Vela M. 2011. “Sentiment Analysis for Hotel Reviews.” In Proceedings of the Computational Linguistics-Applications Conference, 45-52. New York: IEEE.
  7. Kuttainen C. Lexhagen M. Fuchs M. Höpken W. 2012. “Social Media Monitoring and Analysis of a Swedish Tourism Destination.” In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Advances in Hospitality and Tourism Marketing and Management. http://miun.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A577845&dswid=-4159.
  8. Sharma D., Kulshreshtha A., Paygude P. 2015. “Tourview: Sentiment Based Analysis on Tourist Domain.” International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies 6 (3): 2318-20.

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Metadata

Authors
Alaei, A. R., Becken, S., & Stantic, B.
Affiliations
  • School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Australia
  • Griffith University (AU)
Venue
Journal of Travel Research
Published
2017-12-14
Volume
58
Issue
2
Pages
175-191
ISSN
  • 0047-2875 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-6763
OpenAlex
W2774008574
Cited by
622
References
75
Citations by year
2026: 52 · 2025: 67 · 2024: 85 · 2023: 88 · 2022: 105 · 2021: 92 · 2020: 85 · 2019: 38 · 2018: 10
FWCI
21.71
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Journal of Travel Research (publishedVersion)
  • Griffith Research Online (submittedVersion)
  • Cross Connect (Southern Cross University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management › Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Digital Marketing and Social Media
Keywords
sentiment analysis, tourism, big data, social media, online reviews, tourist experience, computational text analysis, evaluation metrics

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