Using Deep Learning to Predict Sentiments: Case Study in Tourism

Technology and the Internet have changed how travel is booked, the relationship between travelers and the tourism industry, and how tourists share their travel experiences. As a result of this multiplicity of options, mass tourism markets have been dispersing. But the global demand has not fallen; quite the contrary, it has increased. Another important factor, the digital transformation, is taking hold to reach new client profiles, especially the so-called third generation of tourism consumers, digital natives who only understand the world through their online presence and who make the most of every one of its advantages. In this context, the digital platforms where users publish their impressions of tourism experiences are starting to carry more weight than the corporate content created by companies and brands. In this paper, we propose using different deep-learning techniques and architectures to solve the problem of classifying the comments that tourists publish online and that new tourists use to decide how best to plan their trip. Specifically, in this paper, we propose a classifier to determine the sentiments reflected on the http://booking.com and http://tripadvisor.com platforms for the service received in hotels. We develop and compare various classifiers based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM). These classifiers were trained and validated with data from hotels located on the island of Tenerife. An analysis of our findings shows that the most accurate and robust estimators are those based on LSTM recurrent neural networks.