Comparing travellers’ experiences in Phuket Island and Samui Island: A sentiment analysis of TripAdvisor

Abstract

This manuscript compares user-generated content from two top island destinations in Thailand, Phuket and Samui, through the lens of destination competitiveness referring to Figure 2. The study employs Lexical Salience and Valence Analysis, along with the Naive Bayes algorithm. From an initial dataset of 33,108 reviews, a detailed analysis was conducted on 904 reviews from travellers who had visited both destinations. Although beaches are a shared core experience at both locations, the results show that, in the eyes of identical travellers, travel experiences related to created resources (like food and restaurants) and demand elements of the destination (like crowd levels and calm) significantly differentiate the two destinations. Consequently, recommendations for demand and destination management can be proposed, focusing on pricing strategies, environmental protection, and infrastructure development to effectively differentiate and imprint each destination in travellers’ minds.