Sentiment Analysis in Relation to Jordan’s Churches - for the Promotion of Christian Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism in Jordan

Jordan has many famous tourist destinations of Christian importance, but it is unable to attract many Christian pilgrimage tourists. With churches being the epicenter for Christian pilgrimage tourists, an effort was made to understand the sentiments of the people towards the churches of Jordan. A VADER sentiment analysis was performed on 1,758 tweets after biased data removal and data pre-processing of Twitter data for one year. The results showed that 56% of people had positive sentiments, 27% had neutral sentiments, and only 17% had negative sentiments towards the churches of Jordan. The most frequently appearing words in the total word cloud were positive, while negative words were rare. This shows that while people are positive towards the church destinations of Jordan, the inability of the country to attract Christian pilgrimage tourists lies in a lack of promotion and facilitation of church destinations. The analysis of real sentiments of people shared on the most popular social media and micro-blogging site, Twitter, makes this research unique. Government and private tour operators can take insight from this research to formulate a strategy to attract Christian pilgrimage tourists.