Light in the middle of the tunnel? A sentimental analysis of tourist responses to ongoing crisis

ABSTRACT

Assessing how tourists respond to ongoing crises is essential but is a barely explored research topic. Drawing from Chaos–complexity theory, this research examines sentiment changes amidst crises and analyses factors influencing tourist sentiments during crises. Sentiment analysis was conducted to identify travelers’ positive and negative opinions extracted from the tweeter. The sentiment of each tweet was detected through a lexicon-based classification approach. Unlike previous arguments concerning the ongoing crisis, the current findings indicate a positive sentiment toward the destination even in the face of multiple crises. Implications and directions for future research are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Ongoing crisis
• tourism crisis
• sentiment
• Sub-sharan
• Africa

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [Project No. 1-BE9C].