Tracking tourism and hospitality employees’ real-time perceptions and emotions in an online community during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Online communities are playing a critical role in social communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. We reviewed 25,795 online comments from Reddit, a popular social-media website with a subsection focused on tourism and hospitality employees, regarding COVID-19. We found key hidden topics dominating employee perceptions (i.e. COVID-19, racism, compassion, employment issues, sanitation), tracked changes of these issues over time, and catalogued the changes in employees’ emotions. This study provides discussion and new insights for tourism and hospitality research within the field of pandemic studies.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• hotel employees
• Reddit.com
• infodemiology
• Big data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Incheon National University Research Grant in 2020.