Purpose
The dynamic yet volatile nature of tourism and travel industry in a competitive environment calls for enhanced marketing intelligence and analytics, especially for those entities with limited marketing budgets. The past decade has witnessed an increased use of user-generated content (UGC) analysis as a marketing tool to make better informed decisions. Likewise, textual data analysis of UGC has gained much attention among tourism and hospitality scholars. Nonetheless, most of the scholarly works have focused on the singular application of an existing method or technique rather than using a multi-method approach. The purpose of this study is to propose a novel Web analytics methodology to examine online reviews posted by tourists in real time and assist decision-makers tasked with marketing strategy and intelligence.
Design/methodology/approach
For illustration, the case of tourism campaign in India was undertaken. A total of 305,298 reviews were collected, and after filtering, 276,154 reviews were qualified for analysis using a string of models. Descriptive charts, sentiment analysis, clustering, topic modeling and machine learning algorithms for real-time classification were applied.
Findings
Using big data from TripAdvisor, a total of 145 tourist destinations were clustered based on tourists’ perceptions. Further exploration of each cluster through topic modeling was conducted, which revealed interesting insights into satisfiers and dissatisfiers of different clusters of destinations. The results supported the use of the proposed multi-method Web-analytics approach.
Practical implications
The proposed machine learning model demonstrated that it could provide real-time information on the sentiments in each incoming review about a destination. This information might be useful for taking timely action for improvisation or controlling a service situation.
Originality/value
In terms of Web-analytics and UGC, a comprehensive analytical model to perform an end-to-end understanding of tourist behavior patterns and offer the potential for real-time interpretation is rarely proposed. The current study not only proposes such a model but also offers empirical evidence for a successful application. It contributes to the literature by providing scholars interested in textual analytics a step-by-step guide to implement a multi-method approach.
Governments and healthcare organizations increasingly pay attention to social media for handling a disease outbreak. The institutions and organizations need information support to gain insights into the situation and act accordingly. Currently, they primarily rely on ground-level data, collecting which is a long and cumbersome process. Social media data present immense opportunities to use ground data quickly and effectively. Governments and HOs can use these data in launching rapid and speedy remedial actions. Social media data contain rich content in the form of people's reactions, callsfor-help, and feedback. However, in healthcare operations, the research on social media for providing information support is limited. Our study attempts to fill the gap mentioned above by investigating the relationship between the activity on social media and the quantum of the outbreak and further using content analytics to construct a model for segregating tweets. We use the case example of the COVID-19 outbreak. The pandemic has advantages in contributing to the generalizability of results and facilitating the model's validation through data from multiple waves. The findings show that social media activity reflects the outbreak situation on the ground. In particular, we find that negative tweets posted by people during a crisis outbreak concur with the quantum of a disease outbreak. Further, we find a positive association between this relationship and increased information sharing through retweets. Building further on this insight, we propose a model using advanced analytical methods to reduce a large amount of unstructured data into four key categories-irrelevant posts, emotional outbursts, distress alarm, and relief measures. The supply-side stakeholders (such as policy makers and humanitarian organizations) could use this information on time and optimize resources and relief packages in the right direction proactively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.