Sipping and sharing: impact of emotions and topics on the usefulness of travelers’ wine festival forum posts

Purpose Aficionados of wine festivals, a component of wine tourism experience, engage in vigorous online discussions that influence fellow travelers’ purchase behaviors. This study aims to delve into these overlooked discussions, identifying emotions, topics and assessing their usefulness in TripAdvisor’s Travel Forums for two US wine festivals: Taste of Yountville and Epcot International Food and Wine Festival, located in traditional and nontraditional wine tourism destinations. Design/methodology/approach The study uses state-of-art sentiment analysis and topic modeling methods to extract emotions and underlying latent topics in travel forum discussions. Drawing from information theory, two regression analyses are performed on 10,677 forum posts to examine how the extracted Ekman’s emotions and key underlying topics influence the helpfulness of wine forum posts for each festival. Findings While three topics were identified in Epcot and four in Yountville, both festival platforms highlight travelers’ common preferences for “culinary experience” and “planning” attributes but reveal notable differences in their utility. Other shared novel findings include the importance of “anger” and “surprise” emotions on the helpfulness of forum posts. Practical implications These findings enhance wine festival managers’ and destination planners’ understanding of online travelers’ preferences and cognitive evaluation of user-generated contents’ usefulness. This marketing intelligence informs strategies for boosting the wine destination’s economic development. Originality/value This research offers a novel comparative analysis of social media on wine festival tourism experiences in diverse regions. Unlike hotel reviews, typically posted after consumption, forums offer unique and broader perspectives on discussions before, during, and after experiencing the wine festival.