The travel dream experience in pandemic times

ABSTRACT

This study was developed to understand how tourists feel after dreamed travel experiences ended up cancelled. The orchestra model that considers experiences as an intermingled process was applied to analyse the negative feelings experienced by tourists during these pandemic times. Through web scraping, over 40 thousand comments from 600 threads discussing the pandemic impact on tourists’ inability to concretize their dreams were extracted from the TripAdvisor forum. Those comments were subjected to data mining techniques, including the generation of topic modelling and analysis of sentiment scores across continents vis-à-vis reported cases and fatalities. Results suggested that despite the disillusion for not being able to travel, tourists were understanding and mostly concerned with the health of their peers.

KEYWORDS:

• Coronavirus
• travel dreams
• pre-travel experience
• orchestra model
• data mining

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [UIDB/04466/2021 and UIDP/04466/2021 and UID/ECO/04 and UIDB/04466/2020 and UIDP/04466/2020].

Notes on contributors

Antónia Correia

Antónia Correia, Universidade do Algarve. She is affiliated at CEFAGE, Research center award by national science foundation, and the President of the executive board of KIPT the first collaborative laboratory in tourism in Portugal. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from University of Algarve (Portugal), a Master from ISEG, University of Lisbon (Portugal), a Ph.D. from University of Algarve in tourism demand (Portugal) and an aggregation from University of Algarve; all relating to tourism and hospitality management. Her research interests are in consumer behavior and tourism economics, models and luxury. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6707-8289

Sérgio Moro

Sérgio Moro is Associate Professor with Habilitation at ISCTE and Deputy Director at ISTAR Research Center, where he coordinates the Information Systems group. He is an interdisciplinary data scientist that envisions the development of innovative predictive systems through data science approaches in distinct domains such as tourism, marketing, management, and education. His publication portfolio includes more than 40 Quartile 1 Scopus indexed articles in journals such as Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Information Management, Journal of Business Research, Telematics and Informatics, and European Journal of Marketing. His work has received more than 1500 Scopus citations. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4861-6686

Paulo Rita

Paulo Rita, Post-Doc in E-Marketing (University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA), PhD in Marketing (Cardiff University, UK) and Postgraduate certificate in Research Methods and Quantitative Skills (University of Glasgow, UK). Dr. Rita is Full Professor of Marketing at NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He is Director of the Master in “Data-driven Marketing” and Postgraduate Programs in “Marketing Intelligence”, “Marketing Research and CRM”, “Digital Marketing and Analytics”, “Data Science for Marketing”, “Business Analytics in Hospitality and Tourism” also at NOVA IMS. Professor Rita research interests are focused on Digital Marketing/Social Media, Marketing Analytics, Consumer Behavior/Neuroscience and Tourism Marketing and has published over one hundred articles in peer-reviewed scientific international journals such as European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Marketing Communications, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Computers in Human Behavior, Computers in Industry, Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems with Applications, Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, among others. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6050-9958