Munawir

The existence of a thematic green open space in Bandung is one of the pioneers in the urban landscape of Indonesian cities. In addition, the thematic park in Bandung is also one of the efforts to realize the concept of a green city besides its function as a medium of channelling citizens’ aspirations. Furthermore, the thematic park concept is to make a difference between one park and other parks and to define its own uniqueness. As public spaces, such as parks, can also be functioned as a place to express an opinion, visitor’s opinion plays an important role. Recently, the online reviews data particularly has been considered as an important factor to influence consumers’ decision and are valued as assets based on valued information. In this research, we used the online reviews method from google maps to collect all information from reviewers about the thematic parks and to analyse the attractiveness of the thematic parks in Bandung City. Our approach is to evaluate visitor’s perceptions by identifying sentences from opinions or reviews regarding the fulfilment of thematic park functions based on its user or visitor, facilities, community activities, and atmosphere of the park. Social network data towards developing urban park attractiveness. The result shows the dominant factor attractiveness of thematic parks is the user or community factor. Moreover, user-oriented thematic park concept generates a special attraction for visitors to visit thematic parks.

The city of Bandung, Indonesia contains thematic parks which use certain themes to highlight the features of the park. They are also used as a branding strategy for the city as a whole. As social networking has become a type of media used by most global populations to share experiences and stories and to influence perceptions, and because online reviews are one way to get potential positive information about the success of a business or service, we analyzed online reviews from the Bandung thematic parks. We identified that thematic parks have an influence on the branding of the city of Bandung. Data collection involved data extraction from Google Maps user reviews. Text mining was used to collect the information attributes needed to determine the public perceptions of thematic parks. Data analysis was used to determine the extent to which a park can be a benchmark for place branding in Bandung. This research found that the influence of the thematic park concept is a good strategy for the city of Bandung. Online reviews show that thematic parks in Bandung are better known than non-thematic parks, and that thematic parks get very good ratings and good opinions from online reviewers. This information is expected to be a reference for developing the concept of thematic parks, especially in the city of Bandung, and it can be used by the government, architects, and urban designers to get a better understanding of the users’ perceptions and as a benchmark for similar projects.