An NLP-based approach to understand customer perspective on virtual tourism

Abstract

The increasing popularity of virtual tourism in the last few decades has seen a rise in tourists opting for virtual tourism to visit new places. However, there are very few studies on “virtual tourism”. There is also a need to examine customer sentiments and views about virtual tourism. To address these gaps, we have utilised natural language processing (NLP) based techniques, sentiment, emotion and word-cloud analysis. Results of the study show that the tourists have generally portrayed a positive sentiment and have shown positive emotions (happy, surprise) usually. The major themes coming out of the word-cloud analysis are knowledge and skills, which shows that tourists generally enjoy when the tour guides are knowledgeable and skillful.