How To Apply Sentiment Analysis to Your Tourism Organization in 5 Steps

This is an article by Trove Associate Olivia Silverman-Franklin.

How do we get a better understanding of how tourists think and feel about visiting a certain region, country, or city during this age of COVID? In a recent research article from Tripadvisor, the trip review tool assessed the following: “while outside factors like COVID-19 variants, international travel rules, and staffing shortages still can represent existential threats to traveler behaviors, year-end sentiment and search data shows ongoing demand for travel remains high”. It has never been more crucial than now to discover what we, the Travel and Tourism Industry, can assemble a greater and safer experience for travelers for 2022 and beyond.

What is Sentiment Analysis? The key to this future in tourism is Sentiment Analysis, an innovative social listening technique that scans and “scrapes” data from across multiple social media platforms, blogs, and news outlets and develops analyses based on that data. Sentiment analysis allows you to actually gain insights automatically from trillions of rows of social and online data that you otherwise would have to analyze manually, comment-by-comment, or post-by-post. Especially in 2022, tourism organizations need concrete and in-depth analysis of sentiment related to the impact of promotional campaigns, for example, or related to the brand health of their destination in other markets.

At Trove Tourism Development Advisors, we apply our in-house experience to take on the sentiment analysis evaluation and insights for tourism boards, destination marketing organizations, destination management companies, and tour companies in order to support marketing, research, and insights or leadership team understand the online sentiment and key themes in online conversations related to travel to their destination. 

What are the Steps to Completing Sentiment Analysis? But if you work at a tourism organization, how can you get started with sentiment analysis? Here are our five steps:

Step One: Align on what your goals are:

In some cases, tourism organizations want to understand the sentiment of the general public in a specific market - like the USA, for example - towards travel to their destination. Or, they might want to understand common themes that are “negative” related to travel to their destination by customers in the 18-32 age group from Europe. Depending on what the goal is for the destination, there is a trove of data out there that is publicly accessible through social listening tools.

Step Two: Identify key performance indicators you would like to measure:

Related to your goal, you can now develop and document key performance indicators (KPIs) that you would like to measure. For instance:

• Sentiment: What percentage of conversations about a specific topic, from a specific place, are positive, negative or neutral? How has that changed over time and what topics are most positive or most negative?

• Volume: What topics are discussed most and by who and where? And in what form of media?

• Comparisons: What demographics and geographic market segments out there are influencing the conversation on a specific destination? How do they compare to other segments? How do they differ based on sentiment?

• Campaigns: What is the impact of a new destination marketing campaign on the feelings of travelers towards a city, country or region or the specific products that city, country or region has to offer?

• Products: What is the sentiment of travelers towards specific hotels, restaurants, attractions and tours within your destination? Does that depend on where they are coming from, how old they are, or what they do for a living?

• Competition: How can you compare these metrics based on your competitors that compete with you for traveler wallet share?

Step Three: Choose a tool

There are a variety of tools that are out there that perform social listening and give you deep insights. At Trove, for example, we have an in-house tool called TroveSentiment that is a social listening tool focused on three elements (1) access for media, social, and consumer data with the largest datapool available out there, (2) Data enrichment and analytics and (3) Data visualization. Here are a few facts on the tool that we use:

• Coverage in 187 languages across 196 countries

• 150+ million sources,

• Access to over 20 social channels and review sites

There are several on the market to choose from. At Trove, we use our tool to set up the right “tracking” to be able to track sentiment related to specific topics online. This “turns on” scraping of data online and allows us to capture historical and real-time insights  as the data feeds in.

Step Four: Review the analyses

With social listening, destinations are now able to use the data to see real-time graphs and visualizations that will help gauge the effectiveness of new marketing campaigns or measure brand health over time.

For instance, destinations can determine:

• Differences and Variations of Online Sentiment: Destinations are able to look at gender, demographic, geographic, or interest-based differences of online sentiment and what that means for how positive or negative an emotional sentiment is towards a destination.

• Reach: Assess the reach of a topic (like safety, visitor experience, food, lodging, etc) across geographies, demographics, and thematic areas

• Sentiment impact: emotional drivers related to a destination associated with a given theme, comparison between points of origin or geographies, reactions to specific campaigns

• Campaign Resonance: Using the data aggregated via our sentiment analysis, destinations are able to look at the hits, volume, and share of conversation of relevant posts out of the entire dataset. This will give us a sense of campaign resonance or reach. 

• Competitive comparisons: Destinations can compare volume, sentiment and activity between destinations and the target markets, as well as between thematic areas. 

• Most improved KPI vs least improved KPI: Destinations can assess on which lever the campaign really showed major benefit and on which the impact is lagging

• Top results by engagement - shows you which results of the campaign have generated the highest level of engagement, whether these are your own posts or posts from other sources.

Step Five: Apply the data to your strategy

With this data, destinations can:

• Measure and assess sentiment of a specific place or group of people on your destination or attraction

• Assess campaign mentions

• Measure and benchmark the effectiveness of posts on owned social channels

• Track and measure the growth of all competitive campaigns

• Devise and optimize your content strategy.

• Monitor brand impact

• Identify and track key influencers

• Create unlimited reports and alerts

Why is Sentiment Analysis important? Sentiment analysis is a technique that can be vital to help the smallest to the biggest of tourism organizations navigate during this new normal. During the last two years of COVID, momentum to travel has increased and prospective travelers have been sharing and re-sharing sentiment about a variety of destinations that they want to travel to. In addition, those that have been able to travel have been sharing their experiences.. The end goal of using sentiment analysis is to leverage these insights to inform the branding strategy of a place or to respond to common complaints shared online. 

How do we help at Trove? Our team here at Trove develops a regional and international tourism market segmentation using sentiment analysis so that destinations can understand what demographics, points of origin, types of trips, trip length, will provide information for their strategy moving forward. Then, we can apply our in-house social and digital marketing teams to use the sentiment analysis and segmentation for major results. 

Staying on top of travel trends, approaching modern marketing, and ensuring visitors receive the most out of their trips during this time can be extremely difficult to navigate without experienced guidance. We are anticipating an abundantly successful traveling year - let’s have a discussion around how we can utilize sentiment analysis to learn more about your past and prospective travelers. 

Interested in seeing how Trove Tourism Development Advisors can help you? Check out our Online Marketing and Social Media Services page .