Digital platforms, particularly video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, have played a pivotal role in influencing travel decisions. As one of the emerging technologies impacting tourist behavior, YouTube has become increasingly significant. The present study focuses on evaluating the South Garut destinations, namely Santolo and Sayang Heulang Beaches, by analyzing comments provided in travel vlogs on YouTube, utilizing the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework through the attitude subsystem of appraisal, specifically affect, judgment, and appreciation. Adopting a qualitative descriptive paradigm, this study aims to elucidate the language phenomena associated with the tourism sector. Six travel vlog videos featuring comments from local tourists were examined, yielding 51 evaluative clauses related to Santolo Beach and 41 clauses pertaining to Sayang Heulang Beach. The findings of this study revealed the presence of all three attitude subtypes of the appraisal system (affect, judgment, and appreciation) within the analyzed data. Among these, appreciation through valuation with positive polarity emerged as the most dominant attitude subsystem. Overall, the results indicate that local tourists expressed considerable appreciation for the natural beauty of both destinations. Nevertheless, negative evaluations were also evident, addressing concerns such as parking facilities, stray animals, garbage disposal, illegal levies, inflated food prices, ticket management, and road conditions. Despite these issues, the general sentiment among local tourists remained predominantly positive regarding both destinations.
Ramadhani et al. (Fri,) studied this question.