Revealing industry challenge and business response to Covid-19: a text mining approach

Purpose: This study aims to conduct a “real-time” investigation with user-generated content on Twitter to reveal industry challenges and business responses to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Specifically, using the hospitality industry as an example, the study analyses how Covid-19 has impacted the industry, what are the challenges and how the industry has responded. Design/methodology/approach: With 94,340 tweets collected between October 2019 and May 2020 by a programmed Web scraper, unsupervised machine learning approaches such as structural topic modelling are applied. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature on business response during crises providing for the first time a study of using unstructured content on social media for industry-level analysis in the hospitality context. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.