Transformations  in
Business & Economics

ONLINE VISITOR’S REVIEWS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON SUSTAINABLE TOURISM BUSINESSES: AN APPLIED ANALYSIS OF USER‐GENERATED CONTENT
Jose Ramon Saura, Daniel Palacios-Marques, Domingo Ribeiro-Soriano

ABSTRACT: In the rapidly evolving tourism industry, technology and social media play a crucial role in the success of hotels’ sustainable practices. In today’s interconnected society, a company’s online reputation and the spread of information through electronic word-of-mouth are crucial to its success. The present study investigates the role of travellers in the success of sustainable strategies implemented by hotels through their social media activity. By analysing a sample of user-generated content (UGC) from 22 hotels selected by the TripAdvisor Traveler’s Choice Ranking, this study employs a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm for topic modelling and a Supervised Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm for sentiment analysis. The results identify 11 indicators related to sustainable tourism and 7 topics classified by sentiment from the traveller’s perspective, including positive indicators such as loyalty, nature, and sustainability; neutral indicators such as customer satisfaction and location; and negative indicators like pollution and dirt, and disappointment. These findings offer practical implications for hotel managers, including the importance of considering travellers’ perceptions in the development of sustainable tourism strategies and the value of monitoring and analyzing UGC to manage online reputation and foster customer loyalty.

KEYWORDS:  online reviews, hotel management, digital tourism, UGC, TripAdvisor.

JEL classification:  M11. M12, M15s.