Exploring creative tourist experience: A text-mining approach based on TripAdvisor reviews of a cooking workshop in Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

Creative tourists are known to appreciate gaining unique and memorable experiences while interacting with and learning from local people. The purpose of the current research is to conduct a case study of creative tourism in the context of Portuguese cooking classes by text-mining online reviews scraped from TripAdvisor. A series of text-mining analyses like frequency analysis and word cloud, sentiment analysis, word correlation, and topic modeling were conducted on 426 online reviews posted between 2014 and 2018.  Our findings indicated that positive emotions, hedonic experience, authenticity, interaction with service providers, interaction with local people, and learning experience, which had been considered key elements of creative tourism in previous research, were indeed appreciated by online reviewers of the cooking class. Also, different types of value, including functional and emotional value, were identified in the cooking class experience. The study result offers directions for business operators and destination marketing organizations in promoting creative tourism at the destination.