Temporal and spatiotemporal investigation of tourist attraction visit sentiment on Twitter

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198857
• Publication Date: 2018-06-14T13:45:09Z
• Authors: Jose J. Padilla; Hamdi Kavak; Christopher J. Lynch; Ross J. Gore; Saikou Y. Diallo
• Keywords: Chicago; Theory and Algorithms; Science; Twitter; Q; R; Sentiment-based approach; Spatial Science; 03 medical and health sciences; Spatio-Temporal Analysis; 0302 clinical medicine; Tourist destinations; Surveys and Questionnaires; Data collection; Medicine; Humans; Recreation; Social Media; Research Article

In this paper, we propose a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists' emotions when visiting a city's tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include day of the year, season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather, as well as special days and activities like concerts, impact tourists' emotions. In addition, our analysis suggests that tourists experience greater levels of enjoyment in places such as observatories rather than zoos. Finally, we find that local and international visitors tend to convey negative sentiment when visiting more than one attraction in a day whereas the opposite holds for out of state visitors.