Mining travelers' reviews on social media: one platform is not enough.

Keywords: social media, topic modeling, tourism, hospitality, data fusion
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 6

Abstract

With growing popularity of tourism analytics, multiple studies have explored travelers' opinions expressed on online tourism and hospitality platforms such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, and others. Very few studies, however, used more than a single platform. Only a handful of studies explored differences in opinions expressed on various platforms by travelers to same destination. We collected cir. 100,000 hotels reviews for same locations in multiple online travel platforms. Data analysis including topic modeling revealed significant differences in travelers’ pattern inferred from different platforms, including type of travel, review’s sentiment, main topics of reviews and others. Fusion of data from multiple platforms is advisable to ensure robustness of findings based on online travelers’ reviews.