Extracting insights from big social data for smarter tourism destination management
ISSN: 1368-3047
Article publication date: 20 May 2021
Issue publication date: 21 February 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to highlight how big social data (BSD) and analytics exploitation may help destination management organisations (DMOs) to understand tourist behaviours and destination experiences and images. Gathering data from two different sources, Flickr and Twitter, textual and visual contents are used to perform different analytics tasks to generate insights on tourist behaviour and the affective aspects of the destination image.
Design/methodology/approach
This work adopts a method based on a multimodal approach on BSD and analytics, considering multiple BSD sources, different analytics techniques on heterogeneous data types, to obtain complementary results on the Salento region (Italy) case study.
Findings
Results show that the generated insights allow DMOs to acquire new knowledge about discovery of unknown clusters of points of interest, identify trends and seasonal patterns of tourist demand, monitor topic and sentiment and identify attractive places. DMOs can exploit insights to address its needs in terms of decision support for the management and development of the destination, the enhancement of destination attractiveness, the shaping of new marketing and communication strategies and the planning of tourist demand within the destination.
Originality/value
The originality of this work is in the use of BSD and analytics techniques for giving DMOs specific insights on a destination in a deep and wide fashion. Collected data are used with a multimodal analytic approach to build tourist characteristics, images, attitudes and preferred destination attributes, which represent for DMOs a unique mean for problem-solving, decision-making, innovation and prediction.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The approach described in this paper is adopted in the NEST (Networking for smart tourism development, INTERREG-IPA CBC Italia-Albania-Montenegro – Project n. 96-1· call for standard project – co-financed by the European Union under the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA II)) project, which aims at enabling a cross-border cooperation between Albania, Italy and Montenegro, in order to create a common branding of the Adriatic-Ionian area as a smart tourism destination at a macro regional level and to develop common tourist routes and products.
Citation
Solazzo, G., Maruccia, Y., Lorenzo, G., Ndou, V., Del Vecchio, P. and Elia, G. (2022), "Extracting insights from big social data for smarter tourism destination management", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 122-140. https://doi.org/10.1108/MBE-11-2020-0156
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited