Introduction
The article “Exploring Thematic Influences on Theme Park Visitors’ Satisfaction: An Empirical Study on Disneyland China” discusses thematic influences on theme park visitors’ satisfaction using user-generated data. The research uses data and customer reviews on Shanghai Disney Resort to assess customer satisfaction and the relationships between customer reviews and rates (Bai et al., 2023).
The tourism industry has been rising and was a primary contributor to the Chinese economy before COVID-19. After the pandemic, the industry has been growing again slowly, with an increasing rate of customer reviews. One of the leading online sites with many reviews is TripAdvisor. Unlike in the service industry, online reviews have been widely utilized in the product industry. This is why the study wants to use these reviews in the service industry to evaluate factors affecting theme park visitors’ satisfaction.
How Research Was Conducted
The data used in this study was collected using a Python-based web scraper programmed to collect all the reviews between 2016 and 2022 from the Meituan platform. They preferred this site because it is China’s main social media representative, making it more authentic to get reviews from. The study collected a total sample of 112,000 reviews from the site, including review date, reviewer ID, rating, the ticket purchased, comments, and others (Bai et al., 2023). The data was then sorted by removing all non-Chinese reviews, then checked on punctuation marks and numbers, and after the data cleaning process, they were left with 70,829 valid responses.
Findings
This research study made several findings that helped the researchers understand customer satisfaction and the link between reviews and ratings. One of the main findings is that customer satisfaction in the theme park is based on the service provided and the playing experience. Different activities, such as service attitude, recommending feelings, or the parking process, negatively affect the rating. This is because the most negative comments were based on the parking process’s complexity, the attitude of the service personnel, and the children’s playing experience. However, visitors’ sense of immersion and memorable, unique experiences, such as leaping over the horizon and roller coaster games, had a positive rating, which was consistent throughout the study.
In addition, the research showed that the concerns of early visitors are significantly different from those of late tourists through analyzing the user-generated data that constitutes their overall behavior. This indicates that early tourists are interested in certain playing items while late tourists rate the experience as a whole. This is consistent with the consumer self-selection theory, which stipulates that consumer satisfaction changes with time.
This implies that consumers pay attention to different features that change with time. Concerning the relationship between customer reviews and ratings, the study found that these factors become less noticeable with time. This implies that customer reviews amplify their subjective feelings with time, but the rating does not.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Park managers should understand the factors that enhance customer satisfaction by creating unique and memorable moments and using them to gain a competitive advantage. In addition, park managers need to take online reviews seriously and use them to improve their services because they have proved to be excellent sources of information and data. However, one of the main limitations of this study is that it has used a single data source (Meituan), which may be biased; therefore, future researchers can use other platforms to have comprehensive data.
Reference
Bai, S., He, H., Han, C., Yang, M., Yu, D., Bi, X., Gupta, B. B., Fan, W., & Panigrahi, P. K. (2023). Exploring thematic influences on theme park visitors’ satisfaction: An empirical study on Disneyland China. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 13(2). Web.