Pod travel in the pandemic era: social media analytics on travel sentiment and spatial distribution
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The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought an enormous downturn to the overall hospitality and tourism industry. Accordingly, a novel trend emerged, called 'pod travel,' reflecting travelers' needs and behavior shifts. This study aims to understand pod travel through two phases. In study 1, pod travel is conceptualized using the text mining approach of Twitter by comparing two time periods: Jan 2019 (before COVID-19) and Jan 2021 (during COVID-19) to figure out distinguishable differences that came out of the pandemic. Specifically, several theoretical concepts, including chaos theory, travel resilience, optimism bias, and xenophobia were adopted to understand the phenomenon, and through a topic modeling approach. In study 2, social media analytics on Twitter is implemented to identify public opinion about the pandemic and their sentiments and spatial distributions of the United States for travel. The findings are expected to deliver meaningful behavioral aspects distinguished from past traveler behavior. In addition to enlightening industry practitioners to overcome this hardship and behave strategically, this study proposes sustainable pod travel that is expected to be more prevalent and prosper.
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Ph. D.