Capturing and analyzing e-WOM for travel products: a method based on sentiment analysis and stochastic dominance
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 28 July 2021
Issue publication date: 22 November 2022
Abstract
Purpose
In recent years, electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) concerning travel products reflected in online review information has become an important reference for tourists to make their product purchase decisions, while for travel service providers (TSPs), monitoring and improving the e-WOM of their travel products is always an important task. Therefore, based on the online review information, how to capture e-WOM of travel products and find out specific ways to improve the e-WOM is a noteworthy research problem. The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for capturing and analyzing e-WOM toward travel products based on sentiment analysis and stochastic dominance.
Design/methodology/approach
Specifically, online review information of travel products is first crawled and preprocessed. Second, sentiment strengths of online review information toward travel products concerning each feature are judged. Then, the matrix of structured online review information toward travel products is formed. Further, the matrix of e-WOM comparisons between any two travel products is constructed, and e-WOM ranking concerning each travel product is determined. Finally, trade-off chart models are constructed to conduct the e-WOM improvement analyses concerning the travel products.
Findings
An empirical study based on the online review information toward six travel products crawled from the Tuniu.com website is given to illustrate the use of the proposed method.
Originality/value
The proposed method can not only realize the real-time e-WOM monitoring to travel products but also be useful for TSPs to improve the e-WOM of their travel products.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 71501063 and 71871049), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Project No. 2019M653794), the Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project of Henan (Project No. 2018CJJ078), the Henan University of Technology Young Key Teacher Training Program (Project No. 2019), the Logistics Research Center Project of Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences in Henan Province (Project No. 2015-JD-04), the Philosophy and Social Science Innovative Talent Support Program of Henan (Project No. 2022-CXRC-27), and The Young Key Teacher Training Program of Henan (Project No. 2021GGJS060).
Data availability: All relevant data are available upon request from the authors.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Citation
Li, Y.-H., Zheng, J., Yue, S.-T. and Fan, Z.-P. (2022), "Capturing and analyzing e-WOM for travel products: a method based on sentiment analysis and stochastic dominance", Kybernetes, Vol. 51 No. 10, pp. 3041-3072. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-02-2021-0146
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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