Explaining tourist revisit intention using natural language processing and classification techniques

Revisit intention is a key indicator of business performance, studied in many fields including hospitality. This work employs big data analytics to investigate revisit intention patterns from tourists’ electronic word of mouth (eWOM) using text classification, negation detection, and topic modelling. The method is applied on publicly available hotel reviews that are labelled automatically based on consumers’ intention to revisit a hotel or not. Topics discussed in revisit-annotated reviews are automatically extracted and used as features during the training of two Extreme Gradient Boosting models (XGBoost), one for each of two hotel categories (2/3 and 4/5 stars). The emerging patterns from the trained XGBoost models are identified using an explainable machine learning technique, namely SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Results show how topics discussed by tourists in reviews relate with revisit/non revisit intention. The proposed method can help hoteliers make more informed decisions on how to improve their services and thus increase customer revisit occurrences.