Theme Park Visitor Experience and Satisfaction: A Case of TripAdvisor Reviews of Three Theme Parks in Orlando

The significant growth of user-generated content on social media has received a lot of attention and big data has been acknowledged as a key source for understanding customer behaviors in tourism. Most of the existing research of this sort has focused on tourist destination and hospitality, but not on theme parks. The purpose of the study was to empirically identify the experience structure and satisfaction of visitors to three theme parks in Orlando by using TripAdvisor reviews. A total of 40,978 online customer reviews from 2016 were utilized for sentiment analysis and text analysis. The findings revealed that visitors rate the three theme parks differently and both unique and similar experience themes were identified. We propose that similarity and uniqueness are crucial for theme park satisfaction, where appealing to tourist needs is important for establishing distinctiveness in areas of similarity and creativity is important for enhancing uniqueness