Ever wondered how tourists feel in their attraction visits?
Lead Investigators
- Hamdi Kavak
- Jose Padilla (Advisor)
Student and Senior Collaborators
- Christopher Lynch (Collaborator student 2016-2017)
- Saikou Diallo (Collaborator faculty 2016-2017)
- Ross Gore (Collaborator faculty 2016-2017)
Project Dates
2015-2017
Summary
This study proposes a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists’ emotions when visiting a city’s tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include the day of the year, the season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather and special days and activities like concerts impact tourists’ emotions. In addition, our analysis suggests that tourists experience greater levels of enjoyment in places such as observatories rather than zoos. Finally, we find that local and international visitors tend to convey negative sentiments when visiting more than one attraction in a day. In contrast, the opposite holds for out-of-state visitors. Below you will see some interesting results we gathered.
Publications & Presentations
- Temporal and Spatiotemporal Investigation of Tourist Attraction Visit Sentiment on Twitter (among the top 10% most cited PLOS ONE papers published in 2018)
J.J. Padilla, H. Kavak, C.J. Lynch, S.Y. Diallo, R.J. Gore,
PLOS One, 2018, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0198857
[Paper] [BibTex]
Last updated on Jan 27, 2022.
