Extracting insights from big social data for smarter tourism destination management

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.