Deciphering the Airline Customers Emotions Landscape: A Sentiment Analysis on Online Reviews

The airline industry, which has intense competition and high business value, is one of the industries where customer-brand relationships are essential, and consumer insights provide an advantage to the companies in the market. Digitalization and the popularity of online platforms make understanding consumers' reactions essential for brands. This study aims to evaluate the airline market from a sentiment perspective using online reviews. Unlike studies that examine the subject in specific sub-contexts, a comprehensive approach is presented that also addresses different airline types regions and user characteristics. The study follows a research framework consisting of three main sections: review, airlines, and passengers. For this purpose, 124.280 reviews from 210 airlines are collected from Skytrax's online review website. Using “Emotion English DistilRoBERTa-base”, a transformative model for sentiment analysis, seven sentiment categories were evaluated based on airline types, airline regions, user travel types, user travel classes and user review rating categories. The study reveals the fundamental patterns of sentiment categories across the framework and highlights the critical role of sentiments in the market environment and user-brand communication.