Cruise passengers’ internal reactions to onboard environmental attributes

This paper presents a method to analyse cruise passengers' internal responses through onboard environmental attributes. The internal responses are defined as cognitive, affective, physiological, and behavioural, while the environmental qualities are described as ambience, layout/design, social, product/service, and onboard enjoyment factors. A generic method to extract engineering attributes from written customer reviews is derived based on text mining, sentiment analysis, and metrics that characterise the success of the cruise experience in terms of customer reviews. The developed framework is demonstrated through open-source customer review data, with a sample size of 172. Even though, being a small sample, the amount of text data signifies the role of automatic data extraction. The method enables the managers and practitioners to a) improve the ship design, b) enhance the ship operations and c) to identify the issues in which both design and operations are intervened. Based on the connection between onboard environmental factors and internal responses, a key performance indicator (KPI) is derived, which is based on the absolute net score and the alignment of the sentiment.