Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

Luyu Wang is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. Her research interests include travel experiences in natural protected areas, text analysis of user-generated content, and tourism analytics. She is also interested in exploring travel behaviors among tourists from different countries when they visit national parks.

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 primary research area is tourism analytics and includes big data analysis, data mining, climate change impacts, and sustainability.

Abstract (150 Words)

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic threatens the health and lives of millions of people all over the world. The spread of the virus hit the tourism industry heavily. Many destinations are forced to shut down, and the right to travel had been ceased in an unprecedented way, altering people’s travel intentions and preferences. One observed trend is a higher percentage of travelers electing trips to natural areas. While travelers’ emotions have been studied thoroughly, little is known if and how the pandemics and higher than usual medical risks associated with travel changed them. The goal of this study is to investigate and detect changes in travelers’ emotions in the COVID-19 year. The additional objective is to cross-comparison the changes among tourists from different continents. The study used the automated sentiment analysis to detect emotions of multi-year TripAdvisor reviews of Yellowstone National Park.

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The Impacts of COVID-19 on Tourists’ Emotions Expressed from TripAdvisor Reviews: Emotion Detection of Travel Experiences in Yellowstone National Park

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic threatens the health and lives of millions of people all over the world. The spread of the virus hit the tourism industry heavily. Many destinations are forced to shut down, and the right to travel had been ceased in an unprecedented way, altering people’s travel intentions and preferences. One observed trend is a higher percentage of travelers electing trips to natural areas. While travelers’ emotions have been studied thoroughly, little is known if and how the pandemics and higher than usual medical risks associated with travel changed them. The goal of this study is to investigate and detect changes in travelers’ emotions in the COVID-19 year. The additional objective is to cross-comparison the changes among tourists from different continents. The study used the automated sentiment analysis to detect emotions of multi-year TripAdvisor reviews of Yellowstone National Park.