Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

Yu Niu is a third-year PhD student at the Department of Tourism, Recreation, and Sport Management at the University of Florida, US. Her research interests include leisure and tourism experiences among older adults, and urban tourism.

Hyejin Park is a first-year PhD student at the Department of Tourism, Recreation, and Sport Management at the University of Florida, US. Her research interests include destination brand image, the impact on social media in tourism, and destination management.

Dr. Andrei Kirilenko is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida. After obtaining PhD in Computer Science he worked for the European Forest Institute (Finland), US EPA, Purdue University, and University of North Dakota. His research includes big data analysis, data mining, tourism analytics, climate change impacts, and sustainability.

Abstract (150 Words)

The significant growth of user-generated content on social media has received a lot of attention and big data has been acknowledged as a key source for understanding customer behaviors in tourism. Most of the existing research of this sort has focused on tourist destination and hospitality, but not on theme parks. The purpose of the study was to empirically identify the experience structure and satisfaction of visitors to three theme parks in Orlando by using TripAdvisor reviews. A total of 40,978 online customer reviews from 2016 were utilized for sentiment analysis and text analysis. The findings revealed that visitors rate the three theme parks differently and both unique and similar experience themes were identified. We propose that similarity and uniqueness are crucial for theme park satisfaction, where appealing to tourist needs is important for establishing distinctiveness in areas of similarity and creativity is important for enhancing uniqueness.

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Theme Park Visitor Experience and Satisfaction: A Case of TripAdvisor Reviews of Three Theme Parks in Orlando

The significant growth of user-generated content on social media has received a lot of attention and big data has been acknowledged as a key source for understanding customer behaviors in tourism. Most of the existing research of this sort has focused on tourist destination and hospitality, but not on theme parks. The purpose of the study was to empirically identify the experience structure and satisfaction of visitors to three theme parks in Orlando by using TripAdvisor reviews. A total of 40,978 online customer reviews from 2016 were utilized for sentiment analysis and text analysis. The findings revealed that visitors rate the three theme parks differently and both unique and similar experience themes were identified. We propose that similarity and uniqueness are crucial for theme park satisfaction, where appealing to tourist needs is important for establishing distinctiveness in areas of similarity and creativity is important for enhancing uniqueness.