Travellers’ online sharing across different platforms: what and why?

Abstract

Purpose There is a limited understanding of experience revelation in tourism. This study aims to fill the gap by investigating the influence of review platforms’ characteristics, i.e. time-dimension and interactivity, on this issue to generate a holistic view of customer experience. Design/methodology/approach This study analysed data from Google Reviews, TripAdvisors and Twitter, consisting of 41,914 records within a three-year span, about Komodo National Park, Indonesia. An explanatory sequential mixed method was performed, adopting quantitative sentiment analysis with a naïve algorithm, opinion lexicon and Latent Dirichlet Allocation for topic modelling, followed by a qualitative analysis. Findings The findings support the proposed interaction between the characteristics of the platforms and the extent of customer experience shared through the platforms. Further elaboration of the data brought up five propositions on the relationship between the time dimension and interactivity characteristics of the review platforms and experience sharing on the platforms. Originality/value This study presents an original and initial effort to gather a holistic view on customer experience. It brings valuable implications to the theory and practice of customer experience management, especially in the tourism sector.