Service quality in football tourism: an evaluation model based on online reviews and data envelopment analysis with linguistic distribution assessments

The emergence of sports tourism has compelled sports managers to rethink the management and improvement of sports facilities. Through service quality analysis, sports managers can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their activities for possible advancement. Hence, this study aims to develop a decision support model based on integrating online reviews and data envelopment analysis to measure the degree of tourist satisfaction and provide benchmarking goals for service improvement. The proposed model employs text mining techniques to discover service quality attributes from text reviews. According to the discovered service quality attributes, we conduct sentiment analysis to reveal the sentiment polarities of the text reviews. Then, we refine the polarities and ratings of online reviews into linguistic distribution assessments. Furthermore, we develop a linguistic distribution output-oriented non-discretionary bestpoint slack-based measure (BP-SBM) to compute the degree of tourist satisfaction and benchmarking goals. The linguistic distribution output-oriented non-discretionary BP-SBM can handle both positive and negative data values, thus overcoming the flaws of the traditional model. Meanwhile, the proposed decision support model investigates how the service-quality attributes interact to provide improvement pathways for an underperforming stadium based on association rule mining. We test the applicability of the proposed decision support model on some Elite stadia in Europe.