Unexpected surprise: Emotion analysis and aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) of user generated comments to study behavioral intentions of tourists

Abstract

Scholarly work regarding tourist behavior requires more empirical support especially concerning methods to extract emotions and sentiments from user-generated comments on social media. Research on predicting behavioral intentions of foreign tourists who faced culture shock (or unexpected surprise) has been under-represented in tourism literature. This paper used Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and Emotion analysis (EA) to predict tourist behavior from User Generated Comments (UGCs) post their travel in three Asian countries. Findings reveal the presence of a sizeable inactive group of tourists who were indifferent towards post-travel behavioral intentions. The study recommends destination managers to consider managing tourist emotions, specifically sad surprise, in the travel phase of the tourists to strategically manage the post-travel behavior of tourists on social media. A conceptual model has been presented to operationalise these constructs to broadly predict destination optimism and destination pessimism proclivities of the tourists.