Abstract
COVID-19 has significantly influenced tourism, including tourists’ and residents’ attitudes toward tourism. At the same time, attitudes and consumer confidence are important for economic recovery in the tourism sector. This study explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s attitudes toward tourism by analyzing time-series data on the number of COVID-19 positive cases, vaccinations, news sentiment, a total number of daily mentions of tourism, and the share of voice for positive and negative sentiment toward tourism. The applied data analysis techniques include descriptive analysis, visual representation of data, data decomposition into trend and cycle components, unit root tests, Granger causality test, and multiple time series regression. The results demonstrate that the COVID-19 statistics and media coverage have significant effects on interest in tourism in general, as well as the positive and negative sentiment toward tourism. The results contribute to knowledge and practice by describing the effects of the disease statistics on attitudes toward tourism, introducing social media sentiment analysis as an opportunity to measure positive and negative sentiment toward tourism, and providing recommendations for government authorities, destination management organizations, and tourism providers.
Highlights
Infectious disease crises are major risks to economic growth [1]
The results show that the null hypotheses that trend components of COVID-19 cases, number of vaccinated people, and news sentiment cause trend components of interest toward tourism, positive sentiment, and negative sentiment cannot be rejected, with the exception of the effects of vaccination on interest towards tourism
This study analyzed the effects of COVID-19 cases, the number of vaccinated people, and news sentiment on attitudes toward tourism in the U.S by using time-series analysis
Summary
Infectious disease crises are major risks to economic growth [1]. Past infectious diseases (including previous coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS) have likewise been detrimental to the tourism sector [2,3]. These previous crises demonstrated the fragile nature of tourism [4] and the concerns of spreading viruses through the human interactions inherent in hospitality and tourism [5]. COVID-19 had an immediate and destructive impact on the tourism industry [6]. Pandemics overall lead to a significant decline in tourist arrivals [7], and the spread of COVID-19 preceded a damaging fall in international tourism worldwide [8]. Demand, spending, and consumer confidence have all eroded during the COVID-19 pandemic [9]
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