Purpose
This paper aims to identify the main themes shared in online reviews by airline travellers, as well as which of these themes were linked with higher and lower value for money ratings.
Design/methodology/approach
The research used mixed content analyses (i.e. quantitative and qualitative) to examine 1,200 reviews of six airline companies shared by airline travellers in a social media platform.
Findings
The analyses revealed nine themes in descriptions of airline travel experiences. These are the core services during “flights”, “airport” operations, crew and ground “staff”, ticket “classes”, “seats”, inflight “services”, “entertainment”, overall experiences of “airlines” and post-purchase recommendations of with which companies to “fly”. Low value for money ratings are linked with the “airport” and “flights” themes.
Originality/value
The results offer useful insights into airline travellers’ overall experiences based on social media information and facilitate the identification of the main themes linked with different value for money ratings.
Digital corporations are creating new paths of business driven by consumers empowered by social media. Understanding the role that each feature drawn from online platforms has on price fluctuation is vital for leveraging decision making. In this study, 5603 simulations of online reservations from 23 Portuguese cities were gathered, including characterizing features from social media, web visibility and hotel amenities, from four renowned online sources: Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Google, and Facebook. After data preparation, including removal of irrelevant features in terms of modeling and outlier cleaning, a tuned dataset of 3137 simulations and 30 features (including the price charged per day) was used first for evaluating the modeling performance of an ensemble of multilayer perceptrons, and then for extracting valuable knowledge through the data-based sensitivity analysis. Findings show that all features from the encompassed factors (social media, online reservation, hotel characteristics, web visibility and city) play a significant role in price.
Purpose
Overall, there is a lack of research using online reviews as a proxy of customer experience when addressing the study of tourism in island destinations.
Design/methodology/approach
The current investigation aims to fill this gap by focussing on an African small island developing states, i.e. Cape Verde. This paper reports of tourist reviews extracted from TripAdvisor from “two islands of the senses” as coined by this archipelago’s national tourism organization, specifically Santo Antão and Fogo islands. The data analysis was performed through Leximancer software to generate concepts out of words, followed by themes.
Findings
The present research focussed on experiences in island tourism to identify their main dimensions based on visitors’ narratives in online reviews. The obtained results are of potential value to the literature by contributing to a better understanding of tourist experience in the context of tourism in islands in an understudied country, Cape Verde.
Originality/value
Results are presented and object of discussion vis-à-vis scientific literature and conclusions put forward in this journal paper.
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