Monitoring travel-related information on Social Media through sentiment analysis

Tourist destinations are increasingly affected by the travel-related information shared through the Web. More and more people first check the previous experiences of other customers before doing their own decision-making. This paper explores the image of travel destinations by analysing the content of opinions shared using sentiment analysis techniques. A sentiment score is obtained and analysed considering several tourist features of the travel destination as well as the usefulness of shared opinions. A well known e-word of mouth community and the city of Barcelona have been used as a case study. The results obtained reveal the sentiment orientation towards the city of Barcelona and its tourist offer. Finally, a sensitivity analysis related to the calculation of the sentiment score is included.