Leveraging Place Reviews to Identify the Effects of COVID-19 on Canadian Tourism

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted travel world-wide and substantially impacted tourism in most countries.  Though many governmental agencies and tourism boards have published data on the impact of the pandemic, in Canada, the vast majority of these data are reported at the national level or sparsely within individual regions.  In this preliminary work, we leverage user-contributed tourist attraction reviews to better understand the nuanced changes in travel behaviour resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.  We examine the regional impacts as well as the effects on different categories of tourism within Canada. The purpose of this short paper is to demonstrate the value of analysing place-based user-generated tourism data and highlight some of the ways it can be leveraged by policy experts and tourism agencies.