Perceived Responses of International Tourists to Transportation and Tourism Services During Typhoons Faxai and Hagibis in Japan

Abstract

There is a limited understanding on the information-seeking behavior of international tourists during disaster response scenarios due to the lack of empirical studies on crisis communication in Japan. This study clarifies the topics generated from both international tourists and official Twitter accounts by applying the embedding Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) topic model and examines the temporal sentiment changes toward transportation and tourism using the sentiment scores obtained from topic-based Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) sentiment analysis during disasters. A case study was conducted using Twitter data on Typhoons Faxai and Hagibis, which struck Japan in 2019. This study found differences in the topics generated among international tourists and officials in response and a continuous negative sentiment toward specific transportation services. The managerial implications of these findings regarding the use of social media in crisis communication in tourism are also discussed.