# Improving RE-SWOT Analysis with Sentiment Classification: A Case Study of Travel Agencies
## 5 Discussion, Implications, and Conclusions
### Implication  
In order to retain a competitive advantage, organizations need to carry out various management activities continuously. Strategic planning is an important organization and management activity that aims to provide a clear road map for implementing strategies and achieving business goals. There are various tools to help organizations make strategic plans, and the SWOT matrix is one of them. The first step in strategic planning is to collect the information necessary to understand and determine the problems, challenges, and trends forming the strategy. Many researchers and industry experts have realized the value of online user comments. Various efforts have been made to mine valuable information from online user reviews, but, to the best of our knowledge, [PERSON] and [PERSON]'s study was the first to link online user reviews with a known strategic planning tool. Their procedure is clear and easy to follow. We employed sentiment classification to make RE-SWOT method proposed by [PERSON] and [PERSON] more practical. As the SWOT matrix is a well-known tool, managers can easily apply RE-SWOT results for strategic planning as usual.  
With the improved RE-SWOT, SWOT analysis using online user comments is no longer limited to assessing mobile apps. SWOT analysis is a framework that facilitates data driven strategic decisions. Therefore, data fed into the process for building the SWOT matrix determine the value provided by the SWOT analysis. Even though RE-SWOT helps to semi-automate the process of building the SWOT matrix, organizations must keep this concept in mind. Depending on the field of application, organizations have to consider appropriate data sources when using the improved RE-SWOT. The quality and quantity of data are both important for RE-SWOT. A large amount of data can help organizations identify as many features as possible, thereby deriving critical features. In some fields, such as the tourism and software industries, it is easier to find relevant and well-known online forums that are big enough to be data sources. The contents of these forums are highly relevant to this field, as organizations need to be able to obtain rich, high-quality data from these forums. However, in some areas, the relevant online forums may not be large enough, or there may not be any relevant online forums. In such cases, it is very difficult to obtain high-quality data. Therefore, the improved RE-SWOT method can be used to aid SWOT analysis, but this does not mean that it can completely replace the manual SWOT analysis method.  
The online travel agent market has declined by \(-20.0\%\) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it still has great potential and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.8% from 2021 and reach USD 902.2 billion by 2023. The online travel agent market of the Asia Pacific region was the largest in 2019 and is expected to experience the fastest growth in the future [50]. Hence, new OTAs are springing up in this growing market. Start-up OTAs need to analyze their own market positions and competitive advantages to survive in the fiercely competitive market. Some researchers have shown that online reviews have a significant impact on the tourism business [51; 52; 53]. Some researchers have conducted sentiment analysis on tourism online reviews [54; 55; 56]. These studies usually utilized sentiment analysis to classify words or features in the reviews into positive, negative, or neutral. Some further compared the classification results using different sentiment analysis methods. This classification may help an OTA understand which features are more attractive to customers. To shape a competitive strategy, the OTA still needs to rely on well-established strategic planning tools. The improved RE-SWOT could be an effective strategic planning tool for OTAs.