On-line opinions and the role of 'value' in the tourism industry in the Caribbean: A fuzzy data envelopment analysis approach to model island competitiveness

Tourist arrivals to the Caribbean have grown on average 3.2% per year in the last decade; however the percentage of repeated customers is uneven across islands. A conceptual model to guide value investment for the Caribbean hospitality industry was hypothesized based on benchmarking results obtained with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). DEA used investments as inputs and tourist arrivals and occupancy rates as outputs to rank islands on financial efficiency to then relate those results to tourists' reviews left online on a cascade of models. Tourists' qualitative evaluations were semantically extracted from customer review websites and classified into perceptions on community, facilities, service and value. Only four islands were deemed efficient in all aspects. Reviews for those best-performing islands emphasized value for their money. Thus, value perceptions are highly correlated to growth on tourist arrivals. The major contribution of this study arises from the methodology proposed to introduce qualitative customer perceptions in quantitative performance evaluation.