Exploring tourist dining preferences based on restaurant reviews

Dining is an essential tourism component that attracts significant expenditure from tourists. Tourism practitioners need insights into the dining behaviors of tourists to support their strategic planning and decision making. Traditional surveys and questionnaires are time consuming and inefficient in capturing the complex dining behaviors of tourists at a large scale. Thus far, the understanding about the dining preferences and opinions of different tourist groups is limited. This article aims to fill the void by presenting a method that utilizes online restaurant reviews and text processing techniques in analyzing the dining behaviors of tourists. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in a case study on international tourists visiting Australia using a large-scale data set of more than 40,000 restaurant reviews made by tourists on 2,265 restaurants. The proposed method can help researchers gain comprehensive insights into the dining preferences of tourists.