Changing tourists’ preferences in the hotel industry amid COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose: The paper aims to find the preferences of different tourist type. Since, COVID-19 pandemic has brought the international hospitality industry to a standstill, there are some early signs of recovery. For this industry’s long-term recovery, the tourists’ changing preferences need to be analyzed. Moreover, with different types of tourists, a more nuanced and in-depth study is required to analyze the preferences of each tourist type. Design/methodology/approach: The research focuses on the changing preferences of the tourist by comparatively analyzing the pre-COVID-19 and current COVID-19 phase. The study extracted online data from TripAdvisor and identified themes by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Findings: The study’s findings confirmed the change in preferences of the different types of tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic by performing thematic analysis. New themes emerged in the pandemic phase, providing more insights into tourists’ changing preferences in the current COVID-19 phase. The study also found that specific dominant themes in the pre-COVID-19 phase were replaced by new themes in the current COVID-19 phase. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to compare the pre-COVID-19 and current COVID-19 phase themes to decipher the new themes that managers of the hotels should consider to win back tourists’ confidence during the pandemic. The unraveling of changing preferences of the different tourist types in the current COVID-19 pandemic is the novel contribution of the study.