Sentiment analyses of multilingual tweets on halal tourism

Abstract

Halal tourism is a fast-growing segment of the tourism market, thus a study of its trends is warranted. This paper examines halal tourism trends by analysing posts (known as 'tweets') on the social networking service Twitter. A total of 85,259 tweets were examined. Nineteen keywords (English and Bahasa Malaysia) were used in the extraction process. Using the extracted tweets, the study (1) examined the origins of tweets among the global population related to halal tourism, (2) identified the major populations around the world that are engaged in halal tourism tweets, (3) analysed the sentiment valence in relation to halal tourism, and (4) identified the popular destinations that appear in tweets. The findings showed that Japan is the most-tweeted-about halal tourist destination, followed by Malaysia and Indonesia. The findings can be used by the various halal tourism stakeholders to plan their future strategies in relation to halal tourism.