New entrants for attractions network evolution

Abstract

Social network analysis has been widely used in tourism studies. Few studies, however, adopted the tourist perspective as a source of analysis or analyze how interactions in the network evolve. The present work analyzes the evolution of the tourist attractions network. Social network analysis was used as analysis technique to map the relationships between tourist attractions in a Brazilian destination based on user-generated content collected from the TripAdvisor website. Results confirm the perspective that density is positively associated with destination development and resilience to economic turmoil. Despite network stability, one can observe network evolution from the entry of new actors. The findings indicate different strategies for entering the network and confirm the perspective that the network evolves in a non-linear way.