Public Reactions to Seafood Culinary Tourism in Labuan Bajo

Seafood culinary tourism has become a vital attraction in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia, drawing both local and international visitors. This study aims to understand public reactions to Labuan Bajo's seafood street experiences through a comprehensive analysis of user-generated content on YouTube. Using comments from a viral vlog by Japanese influencers from the Nihongo Mantapu channel, we explore how digital audiences perceive, evaluate, and emotionally respond to culinary tourism content. A multimodal analytical approach was employed, combining VADER for sentiment classification and Ekman's six basic emotions model for emotion profiling. Additionally, topic modeling using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was conducted to uncover dominant conversational themes. The word cloud revealed strong associations with pricing, taste, and humor, while the heatmap visualization from VADER indicated a mix of neutral, sarcastic, and negative sentiments, especially toward seafood pricing. Ekman-based emotion classification showed \u201cSurprise\u201d (1254 cases) and \u201cJoy\u201d (657 cases) as the most dominant emotional categories, reflecting both astonishment at prices and entertainment value. In contrast, emotions like \u201cFear\u201d and \u201cDisgust\u201d highlighted deeper concerns regarding seafood freshness and authenticity. Topic modeling further supported these findings by grouping discourse into price criticism, culinary appreciation, and environmental awareness. This research highlights how digital sentiment and emotion analytics can inform culinary tourism strategies, enhance visitor experience, and guide sustainable seafood marketing. By integrating computational linguistics and tourism studies, the paper offers novel insights into consumer behavior in a digitally mediated culinary landscape.