PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine how hotel brands communicate on social media before and during the pandemic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in relation to the tourism season.Design/methodology/approachTo gain insights into the communication of Italian hotel brands on social media, this study applies a qualitative methodology. Using the text mining technique, topic modelling was conducted on a sample of 5,032 posts from Italian 5-star hotel brands shared on the hotels' official Facebook pages.FindingsThe results show that hotel brands used essentially the same communication strategy in the tourism seasons before and after the pandemic outbreak, but with a particular focus on trust, safety and cordiality during the pandemic. Hotel brands focussed intensively on brand awareness, customer engagement and special activities that promote memorable and authentic experiences as well as luxury service quality.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the theoretical and empirical sense by bridging the concepts of tourism and hospitality, social media and corporate communication.

While social media have become a daily routine in modern society, brand communication and engagement with customers have become essential elements of marketing strategy and success in the tourism and hotel industry. This revolution of social media, in tourism and hospitality marketing, contributed to the rise of a novel sentiment analysis from a machine learning and natural language processing point of view. The purpose of the study is: to provide a general descriptive overview of comments posted by Facebook page followers; to identify specific textual attributes of hotel brand posts on social media and to apply the sentiment analysis to Facebook comments from four- and five-star hotel brands in Croatia to identify and compare customers’ feelings and attitudes towards the staff, services and products that hotel brands promote by posting messages on Facebook pages. To analyse hotel brand sentiments, the authors collected a total of 4,248 comments and 2,373 postings in English, German and Italian. The results showed that the comments on four- and five-star hotel brands expressed predominantly positive sentiments. Despite the positively oriented sentiments in the comments, Facebook page followers are predominantly passive users and do not tend to comment actively. The results can be used by marketers in the tourism and hospitality industry to plan their future social media communication strategies.

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Purpose – The importance of the "data gold rush" that occurs in real time on various social media platforms is recognized by various tourism stakeholders and researcher. To extract knowledge from textual data, the purpose of this study is to apply text mining techniques to social media data. Methodology – Descriptive statistical analysis is conducted to quantify the activity of hotel brands on Facebook. The topic modelling technique Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to extract and validate knowledge from text data of 25 Croatian four- and five- star hotel brands that were active on social media in 2019. Sentiment analysis is used to identify personal attitudes expressed through user-generated text that hotel brands promote by posting messages on Facebook pages. Findings – The LDA analysis of the Croatian hotel posts extracted 6 topics: Wellbeing, Atmosphere, Promotion, Gastronomy, Surrounding and Satisfaction. The results of the sentiment analysis indicated that Facebook page followers are more likely to express positive sentiments reflecting an overall satisfaction with the promoted products, services and staff by hotel brands. Contribution – It is a unique study that provides an analysis of textual data in Croatian hospitality research. The application of the multimodal approach contributes to a better uses of contents in possible different strategies so that effective indicators can be given to perform an effective communication. This study provides recommendations, challenges, and current insights into applied communication strategies for marketers to increase a greater number of tourists visiting destinations.

This study analyses the visual social media communication of Italian 5-star hotel brands to investigate whether it has changed over the course of COVID-19. An AI-based image content analysis approach was used to extract the most frequently ascribed labels from 2,439 collected photos of three consecutive year samples. The results of the performed content analysis show that the visual communication of the hotel brand is mainly focused on interior design and the natural environment, with the pandemic stimulating the use of the latter. The study contributes the literature by reinforcing the importance of relative consistency in luxury brand communication even in turbulent times.