YANG YANG, PHD: TOURIST BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS USING ONLINE REVIEW DATA

March 15, 2019

Dr. Yang is currently an assistant professor of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Temple University. He received his Ph.D. in Geography, Master of Statistics, and M.A in Economics from University of Florida, as well as an M.Phil in Hotel and Tourism Management from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr. Yang’s major research interests lie in tourism demand analysis, big data analytics, as well as hotel financial and real estate analysis.

With a solid education background in tourism, geography, economics, and statistics, Dr. Yang is able to thoroughly investigate research questions in the tourism and hospitality industry and offer unique insights and perspectives. After ten years of research experience, Dr. Yang’s academic papers have been published in top-tier tourism and hospitality journals. At the same time, he has been serving as associate editor of Annals of Tourism Research as well as editorial board member for many prestigious journals.

So the primary goal of the research was to understand guest satisfaction with urban hotel locations. In his presentation, he discussed a tourist behavior analysis through TripAdvisor data, these examples include “(1). geo-spatial analysis of location satisfaction (2) analysis of sleep quality, and (3) temporal contiguity and review rating (does time dulls the pain).” These factors were decided on in order to find out which factors influence a tourist on their destination, excursions, and amenities.

Most of the data collected on TripAdvisor is review based so when doing the initial analysis of the data, the specific data points that were being observed needed to be pulled from each individual review on the site. A lot of smaller factors seems to be driving for tourists and the decision making process for any hotel - i.e. free parking, location to attractions and airports, as well as green spaces/bodies of water. It is interesting to see where the trends go, but being able to quantify the reviews of individuals into tangible takeaways is vital to tourism development and destination marketing.

The next part of Dr. Yang’s research was a conceptual framework of factors that influence sleep quality in hotels based on personal and hotel characteristics. This data shows, “By analyzing TripAdvisor hotel review data in Los Angeles, I estimate a mixed-effects ordered logit model to understand the factors that influence sleep quality as well as the hotel sleeping environment as indicated by sentiment analysis.“ The findings of this study show that there are many variables, including age, gender, traveler type, and review experience.