Impacts of COVID-19 on global tourism industry: A cross-regional comparison

Abstract

The tourism industry was one of the world's greatest markets; until the world met a pandemic in the 21st century, COVID-19. This study aims to present the reactions of travelers during the pandemic trends outlined by adopting text mining techniques. Between December 30, 2019–March 15, 2020, approximately 75,000 comments are retrieved from the TripAdvisor forums, and 23,515 cases from the US, Europe, and Asia forums are employed for analyses. The results reveal that the tourism sector is easily affected by global crises. It is almost the same day that travelers decide to cancel or delay their trips, with the spread of the news. More in-depth analyses uncovered several topics consisted of comments on benefiting from travel insurance and refund due to the travel cancellations. Travel insurance has become a hot topic, which may be a way of reanimating the industry by offering travel packages, including travel insurance services.

Travellers’ top comments during the COVID-19 pandemic in Botswana

“…Although their analysis was limited to Asia, Europe and the United States, it revealed the importance of travel insurance in light of the crisis. This present article is therefore an application of the suggestion by Uğur and Akbıyık (2020), who contend that such research is still anecdotal in COVID-19 literature. The article is also important from a developing country perspective since crisis-related research is limited in these contexts (Chen et al, 2020).…”

“…Text mining is an iterative process which begins with the collection of a textual data set (Uğur & Akbıyık, 2020). In this case, text was obtained from the webpages that displayed review comments containing five keywords.…”

“…The frequency of codes developed were displayed using chart and bubble diagram analysis. Lastly, coding occurrences where the relationships between one or more codes are established (Uğur & Akbıyık, 2020) and visualised (Egresi et al, 2020) were carried out. The results are displayed using a 2D concept map and network graphs for link analysis.…”

“…Both the supply and the demand side have been affected. For instance, globally, revenues have sharply declined due to the closure of accommodation, catering and leisure facilities, while travellers face restrictions on travel and border crossings (Uğur & Akbıyık, 2020). In China, Chen et al (2020) reviewed the key themes and changes over time of COVID-19 and tourism in 499 Chinese newspaper articles.…”

“…Another study by Uğur and Akbıyık (2020), using text mining, revealed the effects of COVID-19 on global tourism in the light of travellers' and travel planners' comments on TripAdvisor. The main topic discussed between 30 December and 26 April was "trip cancellation", in 40.81% of the cases, followed by "travel insurance" and "coronavirus".…”