Listen to the voices from home: An analysis of Chinese tourists’ sentiments regarding Australian destinations

Abstract

This paper innovatively applies a sentiment-analysis model to capture Chinese tourists' evaluations of destinations in Australia and compares those evaluations with evaluations produced by international tourists. Built on the techniques of lexicon filtering, co-occurrence analysis and semantic clustering, the model analyses online reviews written by Chinese tourists on domestic online social media and for travel agencies. A total of 36,148 portions of tourists' online reviews were collected to generate tourist sentiment ranking and images as the overall evaluation of the destinations. The findings led to the conclusions that the market features and preferences of Chinese tourists remain distinguished from international tourists, which must be critically and continuously observed. This work overcomes the linguistic barrier of transforming the great volume of tourists' reviews into an alternative new data source for global destination marketing. This paper also advances the literature by successfully applying sentiment-image analysis to online tourism reviews.