Food for thought in Malaysian Borneo: Data mining and sentiment analysis of tripadvisor reviews for online destination branding

James Mountstephens and Balvinder Kaur Kler and Siao Fui Wong (2024) Food for thought in Malaysian Borneo: Data mining and sentiment analysis of tripadvisor reviews for online destination branding. Information Management and Business Review, 16 (3s). pp. 1-15. ISSN 2220-3796

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Abstract

Unique destination branding in tourism is crucial to gaining a competitive advantage. Local food is a significant component of a destination brand which Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) must integrate into their official marketing efforts. DMOs must monitor the popularity and perception of their food promotions against the competition. Online promotion and management are challenging due to the rise of usergenerated content. Automatic data mining techniques were used to determine the extent to which tourist food choices on TripAdvisor matched foods promoted by DMOs and how distinct these choices were from a rival DMOs’ promotion. We compared online food promotion between the Sabah Tourism Board and the Sarawak Tourism Board. We developed a software system to automatically extract food branding business intelligence from TripAdvisor restaurant reviews. The application of web crawling and scraping technology was applied to extract data and use Sentiment Analysis for interpretation. Online foods promoted by DMOs for each region were found to contain only a few common dishes, but these were more popular than region-specific foods. Significantly different distributions of food choices were found for each region. Some potentially useful differences between foreign and domestic tourists and locals were also identified. Sentiment analysis revealed hidden information in reviews useful for potential food destination branding. Findings from TripAdvisor confirm practical suggestions for improving brand distinctiveness found in the literature. This study is the first to develop an actual system that DMOs could use to estimate the online popularity of their promoted foods and those of their competition.

Item Type:	Article
Keyword:	Destination Branding, Local Food, Data Mining, Sentiment Analysis, TripAdvisor, Malaysian Borneo
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General). Atlases. Maps > G1-922 Geography (General) > G149-180 Travel. Voyages and travels (General) > G154.9-155.8 Travel and state. Tourism Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA1-939 Mathematics > QA71-90 Instruments and machines > QA75.5-76.95 Electronic computers. Computer science
Department:	FACULTY > Faculty of Business, Economics and Accounting
Depositing User:	ABDULLAH BIN SABUDIN -
Date Deposited:	23 Apr 2025 09:59
Last Modified:	23 Apr 2025 09:59
URI:	https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/43574

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