Do Tourists from Different Countries Interpret Travel Experience with the Same Feeling? Sentiment Analysis of TripAdvisor Reviews

National parks attract millions of tourists to enjoy the beauty of nature. The opinions and feelings expressed by tourists in their reviews through social media significantly impact other visitors’ tourism-related decisions. Notably, tourists from different countries visiting the same park may express different sentiments and post different experiences. It is not clear if those differences could be attributed to the differences in sentiment analysis software for different languages, or they reflect existing variability in culturally defined tourists’ sentiments. To address this question, this study analyzed 27,177 TripAdvisor Grand Canyon, US reviews from visitors arriving from ten different countries with the goal of identification of sentiment differences. We found that while all reviews tend to be positive, there are significant regional differences with European and Japanese tourists routinely expressing lesser satisfaction from their visit. We also found differences in the sentiment expressed in different regions of the same country, such as the north and south of Italy. Overall, we suggest that social media reflects the real differences in the sentiment of visitors coming from different origins.