Online storytelling has become a powerful destination promotion strategy as it effectively conveys information and involves travellers emotionally through inspiring imagination. In this study, we use sentiment analyses to examine the emotion structures conveyed by 60 online stories related to various American destinations. We further examined the relationship between these key features and an important measure of story performance, the average length of time spent on the webpage reading the story. The results of these analyses demonstrate that emotion arousal levels at the start, peak and final stages of the story are significant predictors of reader involvement. The results of this research are consistent with the work by Kahneman and his colleagues and provide a valuable foundation for designing story-based online advertising.

Key words: Tourism advertising, Storytelling, Story structure, Sentiment analysis, Emotions