Research On Expression And Influencing Factors Of Cruise Tourists’ Sentiment Based On Online Reviews

As a typical form of leisure vacation,cruise travel is favored by more and more consumers,and the scale of the global market is growing rapidly.Although the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has largely suspended the cruise market at home and abroad,with the effective control of the epidemic,the cruise industry has turned from suspension to orderly recovery,and will continue the growth trend before the epidemic.With the continuous improvement of market penetration,how to maintain the existing customers and expand the source market will become the fundamental guarantee for the sustainable prosperity of the global cruise industry,and a profound understanding and continuous improvement of cruise tourists’ travel experience will be the key task.At present,research on cruise tourists has presented a relatively systematic and standardized research pattern,but the research perspective mainly focuses on the explicit sentiment such as customer satisfaction and loyalty,and few researches have conducted a comprehensive and systematic analysis on the implicit sentiment expression and influencing factors of cruise tourists from the perspective of sentiment analysis.In this study,97,214 online reviews of 172 ships of 16 cruise brands were used as a data set.Literature analysis,text analysis（word frequency analysis and social network analysis）,regression analysis and multi-group comparison were used to analyze the sentiment expression of cruise tourists and the related factors affecting their sentiment level.Furthermore,it further explored the differences in the sentiment expression of tourists and the cruise attributes that affect the sentiment level of tourists in different market positioning.First,A Sentiment Index was constructed to measure the overall sentiment expression of cruise tourists and the differences of different market positioning.The results showed that: 1)For the overall sentiment expression characteristics of cruise tourists,enrichment activities had the greatest impact on the positive sentiment expression of tourists,involving enrichment,lecture,courses and other elements.In terms of negative sentiment expression,embarkation had the greatest impact on tourists’ negative sentiment,including embarkation,debarkation,disembarkation,airport,etc.2)For the sentiment expression of cruise tourists in different market positioning,in terms of positive sentiment expression,luxury cruise tourists showed the most positive sentiment in terms of enrichment activities,entertainment and shore excursions,and as for other attributes,different market positioning had different bias.In terms of negative sentiment expression,the sentiment performance of tourists with contemporary market positioning was more negative than that of tourists with premium market positioning.The market positioning of luxury cruise ships,in addition to the attribute of shore excursions,the performance of the other nine attributes was the most negative.Secondly,regression analysis and multi-group comparison were used to analyze the influencing factors of cruise tourists’ sentiment level.The study found that the top10 cruise attributes had a significant impact on the sentiment level of cruise tourists,and value for money,dining and service showed a higher impact.The results of multigroup comparison showed that the contemporary and premium cruise market positioning,almost all of the cruise attributes（except fitness＆ recreation and public rooms）will have a significant impact on the sentiment level of cruise tourists.For the luxury cruise market positioning,only value for money and service will have significant effects on the sentiment level of cruise tourists.In addition,there were significant differences between contemporary cruises and premium cruises in terms of cruise attributes such as cabin,embarkation,entertainment,fitness ＆recreation and shore excursions,while there are no differences between contemporary cruises and luxury cruises,and between premiums and luxury cruises.Finally,based on the research results,some suggestions are put forward to optimize tourists’ sentiment and improve cruise tourists’ experience.