Analytics in Smart Tourism Design

Tourism on the Verge

Zheng Xiang

Daniel R. Fesenmaier Editors

Analytics in

Smart Tourism

Design

Concepts and Methods

Tourism on the Verge

Series editors

Pauline J. Sheldon

University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Daniel R. Fesenmaier

University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13605

Zheng Xiang • Daniel R. Fesenmaier

Editors

Analytics in Smart Tourism

Design

Concepts and Methods

Editors

Zheng Xiang

Department of Hospitality and

Tourism Management

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and

State University

Blacksburg, Virginia

USA

Daniel R. Fesenmaier

National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce

Department of Tourism, Recreation and

Sport Management

University of Florida

Gainesville, Florida

USA

ISSN 2366-2611 ISSN 2366-262X (electronic)

Tourism on the Verge

ISBN 978-3-319-44262-4 ISBN 978-3-319-44263-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44263-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955413

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

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Acknowledgments

I wrote my doctoral thesis nine years ago under the supervision of Dan Fesenmaier

at Temple University. In it I used search results from Google and user queries from

several search engines to examine the structure and characteristics of the so-called

online tourism domain. Looking back, my thesis was purely “descriptive” using

“secondary” data, which would most likely be viewed as “unorthodox” back then.

Today, many of the analytical approaches to understanding the new reality, which is

constantly being shaped by information technology, have grown to dominate our

everyday conversations about the meaning of knowledge creation. Since my grad￾uation, I have been working with a number of colleagues worldwide on different

types of research problems related to IT in travel and tourism, many of which can

now be characterized as “data analytics.” While I have benefited a lot from my

collaborators in the works we published together, Dan’s influence and support has

been tremendous throughout my intellectual development. Notwithstanding his

relentless pursuit of rigor and excellence, Dan has huge impact on my way of

looking at the world, particularly with his open-mindedness to research and will￾ingness to learn new things no matter how outlandish they appear at the beginning.

This book embodies, primarily, Dan’s idea of “moving forward” within the realms

of technology, data, design of tourism experience, and the emerging topic of smart

tourism.

Besides, I would also like to thank the contributors of this book. While some of

them are well-established scholars around the world, several authors are actually

quite young, who represent the future of research. I am grateful for the privilege of

working with them on this project.

Zheng Xiang

Virginia Tech, USA

The origins of this book lie with my early years at Texas A&M University where in

1985 we designed something called the Texas Travel Research Information System

(TTRIP), over twenty years of the research conducted by students and staff of the

v

National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce (NLTeC) and with the many

researchers associated with the International Federation of Information Technology

and Tourism (IFITT) and its annual ENTER conference. Indeed, the foundations of

big data, smart systems, and tourism design were imagined by Clare Gunn and

others long ago but now have been actualized by many scholars including Hannes

Werthner, Arno Scharl, Matthias Fuchs, Wolfram H€opken, Zheng (Phil) Xiang

some years ago, and others included in this book, wherein this work has coalesced

into a defined field. In this acknowledgment, I would like to thank all the Ph.D.

students associated with Texas A&M University and NLTeC during this time

including Seong Il Kim, Wes Roehl, James Jeng, Christine Vogt, Kelly MacKay,

Yeong-Hyeon Hwang, Ulrike Gretzel, Raymond Wang, Bing Pan, Dan Wang,

Florian Zach, Sangwon Park, Jamie Kim, Jason Stienmetz, and Yeongbae Choe

for all their hard work, creativity, and support and for their dedication to helping

shape the future of tourism research. And, I would like to thank all my colleagues at

IFITT and ENTER who I have had the privilege to meet and to learn from during

this time. Last, I thank Phil for coordinating this particular volume and all the

excellent scholars giving voice to the visions set forth so long ago.

Daniel R. Fesenmaier

The University of Florida, USA

vi Acknowledgments

Contents

Analytics in Tourism Design ................................. 1

Zheng Xiang and Daniel R. Fesenmaier

Part I Travel Demand Analytics

Predicting Tourist Demand Using Big Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Haiyan Song and Han Liu

Travel Demand Modeling with Behavioral Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Juan L. Nicolau

Part II Analytics in Everyday Life and Travel

Measuring Human Senses and the Touristic Experience: Methods

and Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Jeongmi (Jamie) Kim and Daniel R. Fesenmaier

The Quantified Traveler: Implications for Smart Tourism

Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Yeongbae Choe and Daniel R. Fesenmaier

Part III Tourism Geoanalytics

Geospatial Analytics for Park & Protected Land Visitor Reservation

Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Stacy Supak, Gene Brothers, Ladan Ghahramani, and Derek Van Berkel

GIS Monitoring of Traveler Flows Based on Big Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Dong Li and Yang Yang

vii

Part IV Web and Social Media Analytics: Concepts and Methods

Sensing the Online Social Sphere Using a Sentiment Analytical

Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Wolfram H€opken, Matthias Fuchs, Th. Menner, and Maria Lexhagen

Estimating the Effect of Online Consumer Reviews: An Application

of Count Data Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Sangwon Park

Tourism Intelligence and Visual Media Analytics for Destination

Management Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Arno Scharl, Lidjia Lalicic, and Irem O¨ nder

Online Travel Reviews: A Massive Paratextual Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Estela Marine-Roig

Conceptualizing and Measuring Online Behavior Through Social

Media Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Bing Pan and Ya You

Part V Case Studies in Web and Social Media Analytics

Sochi Olympics on Twitter: Topics, Geographical Landscape,

and Temporal Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Andrei P. Kirilenko and Svetlana O. Stepchenkova

Leveraging Online Reviews in the Hotel Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Selina Wan and Rob Law

Evaluating Destination Communications on the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

Elena Marchiori and Lorenzo Cantoni

Market Intelligence: Social Media Analytics and Hotel Online

Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Zheng Xiang, Zvi Schwartz, and Muzaffer Uysal

Part VI Closing Remarks

Big Data Analytics, Tourism Design and Smart Tourism . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

Zheng Xiang and Daniel R. Fesenmaier

viii Contents

List of Contributors

Zheng Xiang is Associate Professor in the Department of Hospitality and Tourism

Management at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research

interests include travel information search, social media marketing, and business

analytics for the tourism and hospitality industries. He is a recipient of Emerging

Scholar of Distinction award by the International Academy for the Study of

Tourism and board member of International Federation for IT and Travel &

Tourism (IFITT). He is currently Director of Research and Awards for the Inter￾national Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT).

Daniel R. Fesenmaier is Professor and Director of the National Laboratory for

Tourism & eCommerce, Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute, Department of Tourism,

Recreation and Sport Management, University of Florida. He is author, coauthor,

and coeditor of several books focusing on information technology and tourism

marketing including Tourism Information Technology. He teaches and conducts

research focusing on the role of information technology in travel decisions, adver￾tising evaluation, and the design of tourism places.

Gene Brothers, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Equitable and Sustainable

Tourism Management Program at North Carolina State University in the USA. His

career has been focused on university teaching, natural resource management, and

destination planning. Over the years, his focus has evolved into a study of tourism

resource management of both the natural and human dimensions of resource

assessment, planning, and monitoring. A research thread which ties together his

37-year career is the evaluation of changes in destinations and the critical tourism

metrics for assessment of these changes: tourism and destination analytics.

Lorenzo Cantoni graduated in Philosophy and holds a Ph.D. in Education and

Linguistics. He is full professor at USI—Universita della Svizzera italiana (Lugano,

Switzerland), Faculty of Communication Sciences, where he served as Dean of the

Faculty in the academic years 2010–2014. He is currently director of the Institute

ix

for Communication Technologies and scientific director of the

laboratories webatelier.net, NewMinE Lab: New Media in Education Lab, and

eLab: eLearning Lab. L. Cantoni is chairholder of the UNESCO chair in ICT to

develop and promote sustainable tourism in World Heritage Sites, established at

USI, and president of IFITT—International Federation for Information Technolo￾gies in Travel and Tourism. His research interests are where communication,

education, and new media overlap, ranging from computer-mediated communica￾tion to usability, from eTourism to eLearning, and from ICT4D to eGovernment.

Yeongbae Choe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Tourism, Recreation &

Sport Management at the University of Florida and works as a research assistant at

the National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce and Eric Friedheim Tourism

Institute, University of Florida. His research interest includes the role of ICT in

travel decisions, tourist’s decision-making process, smart tourism, and advertising

evaluation. He has authored several research manuscripts published in internation￾ally renowned peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Travel Research, Journal

of Travel & Tourism Marketing, Tourism Economics, Asia Pacific Journal of

Tourism Research, and Tourism Analysis. He also received the Best Ph.D. Proposal

Award from the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT) and

the Best Research Paper from the Academy of Global Hospitality and Tourism

Conference (AGHTC).

Matthias Fuchs, Ph.D. is Professor of Tourism Management and Economics at

the European Tourism Research Institute (ETOUR), Mid-Sweden University,

O¨stersund, Sweden. Prior to this, he was the director of the e-Tourism Competence

Centre Austria (ECCA). His main research areas include Electronic Tourism (i.e.,

mobile services, e-business readiness studies, online auctions, business intelli￾gence, and data mining in tourism and destinations), destination management,

destination branding, and tourism impact analysis. Matthias serves on the Editorial

Board of the Journal of Travel Research, Annals of Tourism Research, and Tourism

Analysis. He is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Information Technology &

Tourism. Matthias is Education Director of IFITT (International Federation for

Information Technology and Travel & Tourism) and has been Research Track Chair

of the ENTER Conference 2012.

Ladan Ghahramani is a first-year Ph.D. student in Department of Parks, Recre￾ation, and Tourism Management and Center for Geospatial Analytics at North

Carolina State University, USA. Her doctoral research explores applying the

emerging methodology to better understand when, where, how, and why visitors

move throughout the cultural and natural heritage sites. Her work also includes

understanding why and how site managers are integrating technology into their

sites. She is eager to improve the experience of visitors and local communities to

cultural and natural heritage sites through decreasing the negative sociocultural and

environmental impacts of tourism applying education technology.

x List of Contributors

Wolfram H€opken is professor for Business Informatics and eBusiness at the

University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten and director of the

eBusiness Competence Centre eBLSIG. His main fields of interest are business

intelligence and data mining, semantic web and interoperability, and mobile ser￾vices. He has been involved in several research projects in the area of semantic web

and seamless data interchange in tourism (EU-funded projects Harmonise, Harmo￾TEN, Euromuse, and HarmoSearch) as well as in the area of knowledge discovery

and management within tourism destinations. Wolfram H€opken has been vice

president and commercial director of IFITT for 10 years. He has been research

track chair of the ENTER conference 2009 and overall chair of ENTER 2014. He

has chaired the CEN/ISSS workshop eTOUR dealing with harmonization in the

field of tourism.

Jeongmi (Jamie) Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Fox School of Business, Temple

University, and a Visiting Scholar at NLTeC, the University of Florida. She is an

active researcher with research interests in tourism experience, experience (service

and place) design, information communication technology, and in situ measure￾ments (e.g., mobile eye-tracker and EDA-based emotion recognition) and applica￾tion. She worked for Korea National Tourism Organization for 9 years, managing

international exhibitions, special events, online marketing, and contents

development.

Andrei Kirilenko, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the Department of Tourism,

Recreation, and Sport Management at the University of Florida. The area of

Dr. Kirilenko’s research is broadly described as interaction between humans and

environment with concentration on the impacts of climate change and sustainability

issues. He is especially interested in the research of social and mass media and big

data analysis. His current research projects include (1) communication on mega￾sports events in social networks; (2) public discourse on climate change in social

media and newspapers; (3) people as sensors: flood monitoring through Twitter

communication data mining; and (4) climate change, land-use change, and agricul￾ture on the Northern Great Plains.

Lidija Lalicic is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Tourism and

Service Management at MODUL University Vienna. Her research interests are

related to technology-enhanced tourist experiences, innovative marketing, and

entrepreneurial practices in the field of tourism. For her Ph.D. dissertation

(a three-paper design), she looked into various innovation opportunities for the

tourism industry enhanced by social media. The dissertation sheds light on how

tourism marketers can benefit from social media spaces in order to innovate and

improve existing products or services. In particular, the dissertation provides an

understanding of the usability of social media spaces for tourism marketers to

engage their customers for innovation purposes.

List of Contributors xi

Rob Law, Ph.D. is a Professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management,

the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also an Honorary Professor of several

other universities. Dr. Law’s research interests are information management and

technology applications.

Maria Lexhagen is an Associate professor and the Head of the discipline of

Tourism Studies at Mid Sweden University where she is also part of the Business

Intelligence in Tourism group. She has a Ph.D. in business administration and

tourism with a special interest in marketing and new technology. Her research

covers business practice, destination management, and consumer behavior, and she

has published internationally in both tourism journals and technology-focused

journals. Her current research interests include the use, impact, potentials, and

challenges with information technology in the tourism industry; destination man￾agement; branding and social media; as well as pop culture tourism induced by film,

music, and literature.

Dong Li received his Ph.D. in Urban Ecology from the Chinese Academy of

Science in 2008. Before he joined Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning &

Design Institute (THUPDI) as deputy director of the newly established Technology

Innovation Center in 2015, Dr. Li spent several years as a senior engineer in China

Academy of Urban Planning & Design (CAUPD). His major research areas include

environmental planning, infrastructure, and disaster prevention on urban and

regional level. In recent years, he adopted the trend of data-driven planning, testing

new data sources, algorithms, and tools for various issues in urban and regional

planning. He strongly advocates a progressive transition from the traditional static

paradigm in planning toward a more dynamic and integrated one in the new era of

big data.

Han Liu is an Associate Professor in Quantitative Economic at Jilin University in

China. He obtained his Ph.D. from the same University and is currently working as

a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong

Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests are focused on tourism demand

forecasting and has presented research papers at such international conferences as

the 5th Conference of the International Association for Tourism Economics (IATE

2015) and the 2nd Global Tourism and Hospitality Conference Hong Kong 2016.

Elena Marchiori, Ph.D. is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at USI—

Universita della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland), Faculty of Communica￾tion Sciences. She holds an M.Sc. in Media Management and a Ph.D. in Commu￾nication Sciences. She is the executive director of webatelier.net, the eTourism Lab

at USI, and works for the Institute of Communication Technologies at USI. She is

member of IFITT (International Federation for Information Technologies in Travel

and Tourism) and general secretary of the IFITT Swiss Chapter. Her research

interests are online tourism communication, reputation in online media, maturity

of destinations and web adoption, and media effects.

xii List of Contributors

Estela Marine-Roig is a Serra Hu´nter Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Economics

and Tourism, University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain, an Assistant Professor of

Social Media and Smart Tourism at the Open University of Catalonia and a post￾doctoral researcher in the GRATET research group of the Rovira i Virgili Univer￾sity, Catalonia. She holds a European PhD in Tourism and Leisure, an MSc in

Tourism Management and Planning, a BA in Humanities, and a BA in Tourism. In

2015, the International Federation for Information Technologies and Travel &

Tourism (IFITT) awarded her the Thesis Excellence Award for a Doctoral Thesis,

and the Spanish Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA)

accredited her as Associate Professor in Social and Juridical Sciences in recognition

of her academic career. Her research interests include the analysis of the image and

identity of tourist destinations through tourism online sources, especially user￾generated contents.

Thomas Menner successfully completed his master’s degree in business infor￾matics at the University of Applied Science Ravensburg-Weingarten, Germany.

Within the fields of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, his main researches are

Text Mining and more specific the field of Sentiment Analysis. At the moment,

T. Menner participates in a touristic research project of Mid-Sweden University.

Juan L. Nicolau is a Full Professor of Marketing and Ph.D. in Economics and

Business Administration. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Economics and

Business Administration at the University of Alicante. He has been visiting scholar

at the National Laboratory for Tourism and eCommerce and at the Coggin College

of Business (University of North Florida). He has won the Prize for Teaching

Excellence as the best professor of the year awarded by the Valencian Regional

Government and the University of Alicante and has received more than ten research

prizes. He has published in Strategic Management Journal, Omega, European

Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Business Research, European Journal

of Marketing, Economics Letters, Marketing Letters, Annals of Tourism Research,

Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Economics, Interna￾tional Journal of Hospitality Management, Journal of Hospitality & Tourism

Research, Tourism Geographies, International Marketing Review, Journal of Ser￾vices Marketing, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, and Journal of

Cultural Economics.

Irem Onder € is Assistant Professor at the Department of Tourism and Hospitality

Management. She obtained her Ph.D. from Clemson University, South Carolina,

where she worked as a research and teaching assistant from 2004 until 2008. She

obtained her master’s degree in Information Systems Management from Ferris

State University, Michigan. She has two main research interests, which are infor￾mation technology and tourism economics. Her specific information technology￾related interests include social media, user-generated content, big data analysis,

decision support systems, and online travel information search. Her tourism

List of Contributors xiii

economics interests are about tourism forecasting, comparison of accuracy of

various forecasting models, and city tourism.

Bing Pan, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Department of Hospitality and

Tourism Management and Head of Research in the Office of Tourism Analysis

within the School of Business at the College of Charleston, USA. He has published

in the area of information technologies and their adoption in the hospitality and

tourism industries. His research publications include using online data to under￾stand, predict, monitor, and forecast tourism economic activities, tourist online

behavior, social media, search engine marketing, and research methodologies.

Dr. Pan has consulted with the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau

for ten years.

Sangwon Park is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Hospitality and Tourism

Management in the University of Surrey, UK. His research includes information

search behaviors, travel decision-making process, hospitality and tourism market￾ing, and influence of information technology on travel behaviors.

Arno Scharl heads the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL Uni￾versity Vienna and is the Managing Director of webLyzard technology. Previously,

he held professorships at the University of Western Australia and Graz University

of Technology and was a Visiting Fellow at Curtin University of Technology and

the University of California at Berkeley. Arno Scharl completed his doctoral

research and habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Additionally, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports

Physiology. He has authored more than 170 refereed publications and edited two

books in Springer’s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series. His

research interests focus on Web intelligence and big data analytics, human–com￾puter interaction, and the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology.

Zvi Schwartz, Ph.D. is a Professor of hotel management at Lerner’s College of

Business and Economics, University of Delaware. Prior positions include a Marriott

Senior Faculty Fellow for Hospitality Finance and Revenue Management at Vir￾ginia Tech, associate professor at the University of Illinois, and over a decade of

lodging industry experience as a manager and an entrepreneur. His scholarly

research and industry consulting focus on the core technical and strategic elements

of hospitality revenue management. He is a recipient of numerous research awards,

including three times ICHRIE’s best published paper of the year, and over $600,000

in research grants.

Haiyan Song is Chair Professor of Tourism in the School of Hotel and Tourism

Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests

include tourism demand modeling and forecasting, impact assessment, and tourism

supply chain management. He has published in such journals as Annals of Tourism

xiv List of Contributors