An Exploratory Study of Twitter Sentiment Analysis During COVID-19: #TravelTomorrow and #UNWTO

Abstract

Purpose: The COVID-19 has impacted travel and tourism like no other event before in history and Tourism is the hardest hit of all economic sectors. As of now, 96% of all worldwide destinations have introduced travel restrictions in response to the pandemic. Analyzing the impact of COVID-19 sentiments throws some light on the overall situation and provides insights and guidance for recovery measures. Design: The research focuses on the collection of tweets referring to #TravelTomorrow online campaign and tweets from #UNWTO subsequently evaluated through a sentiment analysis using NViVo. Findings: We analyzed the twitter sentiments in a systematic way and investigate the insights of twitter sentiments in COVID-19 situation. Our research result shows the valence of sentiments such as positive, moderately positive, very positive, negative, moderately negative and very negative sentiments which are helpful to the tourism stakeholders for their decision making. Research Implications: The key insights, themes, subthemes and sentiments which are useful to the policy makers for their strategic decision making and the implications of this research is helpful for the academic and tourism practitioners in tourism industry. Originality: The insights of this research are helpful to Destination Marketing Organizations of developing countries to popularize their destinations and helpful for the faster recovery measures from the pandemic situations.