Exploring cruise tourists' sentiment expression pattern from online reviews: An insight into market positioning

Abstract

The accumulation of information on online travel communities provides a useful reference for tourists and reflects tourists' positive or negative sentiments during the whole experience process. Using over 97,000 online reviews, including 172 cruise ships across 16 brands, the current study applies sentiment analysis to explore how tourists express their sentiments about elements and attributes of the cruise experience and differences in market positioning. The results show that among 10 attributes and over 50 elements, attributes of enrichment activities, service, fitness, and recreation are the most pivotal antecedents of positive sentimental expression. Service, lecture, steward, show, snorkelling, spa, music, balcony, and the beach have shown high positive sentimental intensity. For negative sentimental expression, embarkation attributes, including elements of embarkation, debarkation, and disembarkation, are the dominant attribute. When tourists express negative sentiments, elements of the bed, casino, buffet, food, and staff are also exhibited higher intensity. As such, how other cruise attributes and elements stimulate the formation of tourists' sentiments is explored. Additionally, differences in tourists' sentiment expression in market positioning are identified, bringing a new research agenda to cruise brand positioning. This study provides a sentiment basis for a deep understanding of tourists' sentiment preference at cruise attribute and element levels to improve tourists' cruise experience. This study also exhibits a paradigm shift in sentiment research by establishing relationships between cruise attributes/elements and sentiment words.