Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore and compare changes in tourist opinion during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the COVID-19 outbreak has caused changes in all areas of our lives, the conditions related to confinement during a lockdown have led to changes in tourists' habits and behaviors.
Design/methodology/approach
To analyze opinion changes about tourist attractions, this study performed topic modeling by summarizing topics into five dimensions: management, scenery, price, suggestion, and safety; then, based on the topic modeling results, sentiment analysis and emotion analysis were conducted to explore the change of tourists' opinion during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Findings
According to the results, this study confirmed the pandemic's positive effect on tourists' opinions about attractions after the COVID‐19 outbreak. Presumably due to the absence of lines and crowed. Moreover, the dimension 'Safety' started to appear in US tourists' attractions reviews only in the period after the outbreak and during the mass vaccination. These results mean that tourists started to care more about safety due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.