Online social networks are platforms increasingly used by tourists in evaluating points of attraction of a tourist destination. User generated content (UGC) about its tourism experience is considered to be the true "voice of the visitor", while being perceived by others as genuine, as opposed to marketing messages, which can have a powerful influence
on other potential tourists. Despite the growing tendency to study UGC in the tourism field, most of the studies are dedicated to the hospitality and trip area, while this research concerns the cultural patrimony based on the analysis of reviews on two museums on Tripadvisor. Furthermore, this work shed new light in this research area through its inductive research method given that one intends to obtain insights from the reviews assuming an interpretative positioning. As this study considers human behaviors in the online, a netnographic research design was applied.
Through a collaborative and progressive process and the help of the software NVivo 12, the reviews (n=500) from the last year were analyzed and a codebook with categories (10) and several attributes was created. At the end a fine-grained analysis of the aspects and sentiments was carried out.
The main results show that the museums collections in their variety and richness are the most frequent aspects mentioned, followed by the experience of the visit. For both museums the share of positive sentiment ranges from 100% to 40%. The interrater agreement among evaluators on the valence of the reviews varies between 0.87 and 0.92.
This research adds more knowledge in studying the phenomenon of UCG in online comminities. Furthermore, as we executed a netnographic research design in this specific area, we provided insights in patterns of the tourists in this industry and by that enable a guiding work for researchers that want to investigate the same or similar tourist attractions.
From a practical perspective, there are certain aspects this paper investigated, which can be used as guidelines for manager decisions.Investigação financiada pelo IPL - Politécnico de Lisboa como um Projeto de Investigação, Desenvolvimento, Inovação e Criação Artística (IDI&CA) – IPL/2018/IDICATURISLX18_ESCSN/
