Sentiment analysis applied to tourism: exploring tourist-generated content in the case of a wellness tourism destination

Abstract

Sentiment analysis of content generated by tourists through social media platforms can be used to generate knowledge about a wellness tourism destination. The present research aims to explore the content generated by tourist reviews, analyse the sentiments about a wellness tourism destination made in comments on hotels, evaluate the sentiment of tourists towards the various components of this kind of destination, and identify the motivations for tourists to look for wellness tourism destinations, such as the Algarve. The analysis of the reviews of the tourism components demonstrates tourists’ opinions about the wellness destination and also grades the infrastructure facilities and the highlighted services for the categories of this type of tourism. In attaining the objectives of this study, quantitative methods were used to review 1294 comments extracted from TripAdvisor, to which text mining algorithms were applied to assess the sentiment expressed in the comments. The results show that the three keywords most frequently used for all component categories in the Algarve wellness destinations are “great”, “love” and “visit”, and also reveal that a hotel providing spa and massage services in the tourist wellness destination mainly satisfies the desires of a tourist.