Chinese cultural theme parks: text mining and sentiment analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore cultural aspects and factors of Chinese theme parks and identify the sentiment of tourists’ online reviews, thus bridging the academic gap of a lack of knowledge on the theme park industry's cultural aspects. This research adopted social media analytics and explored 18,753 original reviews in 160 Chinese cultural theme parks. The results identified nine cultural aspects, and tourists’ attitudes among them are sorted in descending order as follows: historical figures and Chinese history/dynasties, folk art and traditional crafts, myths and legends, traditional architecture, literature and painting, drama and dance, folk customs and beliefs, traditional flowers and plants, and traditional food. Moreover, this paper identified the effects of cultural aspects of theme parks on tourists’ sentiment, which provided further insight for industry practitioners in setting marketing and operation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural theme park
• sentiment analysis
• Chinese culture
• online reviews

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tingting Zhang

Dr. Tingting Zhang is an Assistant Professor at Rosen College of Hospitality Management at University of Central Florida, Florida, USA. Her research interests include big data analysis, value co-creation, and customer experience. Her research papers have won Highly Commended Paper Awards from Journal of Service Management (2014, 2015), Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management (2016), and International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (2019).

Bin Li

Dr. Bin Li is an associate professor at Tourism Management Department at Minnan Normal University of Fujian Province, China. Her research interests include big data analysis, crisis management, customer experience and cultural tourism research.

Nan Hua

Dr. Nan Hua, Chair of Hospitality Services Department at UCF; Board director and past president of the International Association of Hospitality Financial Management Education; contributing editor of Journal of Hospitality Financial Management and editorial board member of International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Tourism Economics, Journal of Hospitality Financial Management; produced 57 refereed journal articles and over 100 academic publications; grant projects totaling over $1,300,000; received UCF Excellence in Research Awards, Penn State Hotel & Restaurant Society Emerging Professional Award, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Award, HFTP-iHITA Best Research Paper Award, UCF Fellow of Academy Award, and JHTT Best Paper Award.