SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT IN CROATIAN HOTEL INDUSTRY

While social media have become a daily routine in modern society, brand communication and engagement with customers have become essential elements of marketing strategy and success in the tourism and hotel industry. This revolution of social media, in tourism and hospitality marketing, contributed to the rise of a novel sentiment analysis from a machine learning and natural language processing point of view. The purpose of the study is: to provide a general descriptive overview of comments posted by Facebook page followers; to identify specific textual attributes of hotel brand posts on social media and to apply the sentiment analysis to Facebook comments from four- and five-star hotel brands in Croatia to identify and compare customers' feelings and attitudes towards the staff, services and products that hotel brands promote by posting messages on Facebook pages. To analyze hotel brand sentiments, the authors collected a total of 4,248 comments and 2,373 postings in English, German and Italian. The results showed that the comments on four- and five-star hotel brands expressed predominantly positive sentiments. Despite the positively oriented sentiments in the comments, Facebook page followers are predominantly passive users and do not tend to comment actively. The results can be used by marketers in the tourism and hospitality industry to plan their future social media communication strategies.