Attributes Influencing Tourist Satisfaction: Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling of Online Reviews

Understanding the factors influencing tourist satisfaction helps enhance destination loyalty and economic revenue. While several tourists post online reviews to document and share travel experiences and perceptions, few attempts have employed online reviews to improve and develop ethnic tourism. This study comprehensively explores the attributes affecting tourist satisfaction utilizing online reviews, aiming to expand the literature on ethnic tourism. This study combines sentiment analysis using SnowNLP and topic modeling based on Latent Dirichlet allocation to conduct text mining on 26,966 reviews of attractions in Guizhou Province, China. A tendency toward positive sentiment exists among tourists. Six vital attributes that influenced satisfaction were identified: experience, transportation, management, commercialization, natural scenery, and ticket price. Among these, the first four are critical to ethnic tourism. These results offer insights for destination management organizations to improve satisfaction. This study bridges the limitations of traditional survey methods in capturing the diverse attributes that affect tourist satisfaction through sentiment analysis and topic modeling, providing a holistic perspective and comprehensive understanding of the research outcomes. Moreover, this study surpasses previous literature by revealing temporal trends in the identified attributes and differences across tourist groups.