Great Potential for Sentiment Analysis in Tourism

Sentiment data can make or break a successful marketing campaign. Destinations have for long tracked feedback through surveys or manually through TripAdvisor, Facebook and other channels. This type of feedback collection is often manually done by tourism boards, tourism authorities or tour companies to track feedback on a specific attraction, city, town, hotel, or national destination.

Especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, destinations need easier ways to extract sentiment around consumer readiness to travel. This type of sentiment analysis can be collected with surveys or, more efficiently, through online social media channels. Sentiment analysis as a model can allow destinations to automate much of the data collection. Only 27% of destinations surveyed used an automated form of sentiment analysis.

A destination will use a sentiment analysis tool, like trovesentiment, to scrape social media channels like TripAdvisor, Twitter, Facebook and travel forums, extract the right data, group the data and analyze the information to provide insights on tourism trends and feedback. This is a quicker and more efficient way to analyze large amounts of sentiment data without wasting time and money manually scanning through thousands of site pages.

For instance, destinations can use sentiment analysis to analyze sentiment from travelers to understand where travelers will be most excited to go when tourism re-opens. For instance, destinations have been scanning tourist sentiment from 2019 and early 2021 to see if there are trends on where the most positive feedback has centered on. In addition, sentiment analysis can be used to extract public opinion on safety and security in the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to a specific destination.

In addition, destinations can use sentiment analysis in a predictive fashion. Destinations are able to understand what conditions existed during high tourism numbers in 2019, for example, and use that to replicate certain conditions for specific tourism sites or attractions or for wider destination programming in 2021. In addition, sentiment analysis can identify geographic or demographic segments that may feel one way towards a destination or attraction vs another.

Trove uses its Insights & Analytics team and trovesentiment product to work with destinations on wide-scale sentiment analysis. For a Southeast Asian tourism organization, for example, we performed sentiment analysis on a broad set of feedback data on Facebook and Twitter to align on priority tourism products for the upcoming year. Our sentiment analysis can lay the groundwork for a market segmentation or brand strategy. Or, a tourism board might want to use sentiment analysis to inform a destination growth strategy over time. Sentiment analysis saves time and money and allows a tourism organization to focus on other things.

Learn more about trovesentiment and our Insights & Analytics team.