Tourism forecasting with granular sentiment analysis

Abstract

Generic sentiment calculations cannot fully reflect tourists' preferences, whereas fine-grained sentiment analysis identifies tourists' precise attitudes. This study forecasted visitor arrivals at two tourist attractions in China using Internet data from multiple sources. Empirical results indicate that 1) fine-grained sentiment analysis of online review data can substantially improve tourism demand models' forecasting performance; 2) combining multidimensional sentiment analysis–based online review data with search engine data outperforms search engine data in tourism demand prediction; and 3) fine-grained sentiment analysis–based online review data and search engine data maintain stable predictive power during times of uncertainty.