A sentiment analysis approach to investigate tourist satisfaction towards transport systems: the case of Mount Etna

This paper aims at analysing tourist satisfaction towards transport systems of the touristic destination using online reviews from TripAdvisor, the most well-known online review platform used in the tourism sector for researchers and customers. First, a web scraping method was used to retrieve online reviews available on TripAdvisor related to transport systems, then the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method was implemented to extract the topics of the online reviews, and finally an analysis was performed to find similarities and differences among positive and negative reviews for each topic in order to identify tourist trends towards transport systems. To test the methodology, the case of Mount Etna has been considered, one of the main tourist destinations in Sicily (Italy), located on the east coast of the island. According to the results of our case study, the reviews can be clustered in positive and negative predicted feelings, and, for each of them 2 topics (Topic 0 and Topic 1) are linked. Topics are related to specific tourist experience characteristics and the differences between positive and negative reviews can be ascribed to a different relationship between transport and tourism concepts. Main results show a positive attitude of tourists towards the of transport as an integrated experience of the visit of the touristic location. The proposed approach is able to provide useful information to decision-makers by identifying the possible criticalities and intervention priorities considering user judgment. Besides, this methodology can be easily applied to other tourist venues and can be used by decision-makers to provide better services with the aim of improving the engagement of tourists with the city and increasing profits.