The middle east 3 : a sentiment analysis on airline customer reviews

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceAlong with the exponential growth of social media, the world has taken a turn, and we are no longer limited to the knowledge of our network of friends and family. Word-of-Mouth became especially relevant since travel services are intangible products and when the customers are unfamiliar with a service provider they rely on sources with experience to lower their scepticism. Online reviews are important sources of the consumer experience that can be explored to get valuable insights. Sentiment analysis has been applied to almost any field of study including tourism and hospitality. The Airline industry revenues come mostly from air passengers, and the most significant impact of research on airline service quality comes from the combination of the customer’s real experience and satisfaction. This dissertation has the goal to understand the polarity distribution on the aspects that influenced the three biggest Middle Eastern airlines customer’s satisfaction from 2014 to 2016, on Skytrax and if that polarity found on Skytrax matches the one found on TripAdvisor for 2016. The database was extracted with a web scraper and analysed with Excel Add-in from MeaningCloud. In-flight Entertainment revealed to be the aspect with the most positive sentiment for Emirates and Etihad Airways, while for Qatar Airways the strength is on the Employees aspect. The Convenience of the Flight Schedule was an issue for the reviewers regardless of the airline