COVID-19 staycations and the implications for leisure travel.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the re-emergence of staycations to the fore, as many people were forced to spend their vacations at or close to home due to travel restrictions. This phenomenon first went mainstream during the 2008 financial crisis, and has now been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated the growth and practice of staycations during the first two years of the pandemic by analyzing social media and internet search data using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and Google Trends analytics. Key findings suggest that, while spatially close to home, people tried to achieve a psychological distance away from home. This was demonstrated by a strong global search interest in spending staycations at hotels close to home. The optimal LDA topic model produced 38 topics which were classified under four aggregate dimensions of antecedents, attributes, activities, and consequences of staycations. The findings provide useful insights to managers and policymakers on boosting revenue through this practice, and the role of staycations in promoting leisure activities close to home and sustainable tourism.

#CoronavirusCruise: Impact and implications of the COVID-19 outbreaks on the perception of cruise tourism.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Diamond Princess became the center of the largest outbreak outside the original epicenter in China. This outbreak which left 712 passengers infected and 14 dead, followed by subsequent outbreaks affecting over one-third of the active ships in the cruise industry's global fleet, quickly became a crisis that captured public attention and dominated mainstream news and social media. This study investigates the perception of cruising during these outbreaks by analyzing the tweets on cruising using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The findings show a prevalent negative sentiment in most of the analyzed tweets, while the criticisms directed at the cruise industry were based on perceptions and stereotypes of the industry before the pandemic. The study provides insight into the concerns raised in these conversations and highlights the need for new business models outside the pre-pandemic mass-market model and to genuinely make cruising more environmentally friendly.