EFTI researchers present at the virtual American Association of Geographers conference
EFTI’s faculty and students are outstanding not just in the field of tourism, but also in their interdisciplinary projects. For another year, our researchers represented EFTI and UF in the Association of American Geographers conference, virtually this time.
On April 9, Dr. Andrei Kirilenko collaborated with Dr. Yang Yang from Temple University to host a session titled: “Tourism Analytics: Social Media, Spatially Distributed Data and Data Mining in Tourism Research”, with presentations from both hosts as well as UF PhD Candidates Lijuan Su, Luyu Wang and Shihan (David) Ma. Each presenter shared their studies in around 15 minutes to an audience of 70+ attendees.
Dr. Kirilenko presented Automated topic modeling of negative tourist reviews: Does Anna Karenina principle apply? his study conducted in collaboration with Dr. Svetlana Stepchenkova (UF) and Dr. Xiangyi Dai (Beijing Capital University). The Anna Karenina principle states the concept that “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and is used in a variety of science areas to analyze unsatisfaction. In this study, the group analyzed online reviews of major tourism attractions around the world aiming to investigate the proposition that “reviews of the customers with low satisfaction of the attractions have low topic interpretability as compared with reviews left by the satisfied customers.” The study concludes that the Anna Karenina principle is indeed present, as there is a great diversity of issues presented on negative reviews than good aspects presented on the positive reviews, which makes positive reviews easier to interpret while negative reviews present a low interpretability.
Dr. Yang Yang from Temple University presented Nocturnal activities of urban tourists, a study that leveraged big data to track experiences of nocturnal urban tourists, aiming to understand the phenomena involved with night tourism, exploring specific activities and the impact in the economy. The study analyzed the profile of night tourists as well as temporal, geographic and emotional patterns (on social media posts). Findings show that there is a larger quantity of residents than tourists in nighttime activities in the city, and also learned that tourists travel away from the city center around 9pm, returning to it after midnight. Conclusions of the study include that tourists’ choice of engaging in nocturnal activities does not depend on the weather, nocturnal tourism activities move to peripheral areas (at least in Beijing) during the night, specially attracted by food & beverage, shopping, and entertainment. Implications of this study include helping DMOs to better monitor tourists’ nocturnal experiences, conduct facility planning based on their patterns, plan to maximize the economic benefits and minimize negative impacts as well as forecast demand and use geo-spatial tools to design better routes.
Lijuan Su, PhD Candidate at UF presented Information Transmissions of Online Firestorm: “5-star Hotels’ Hygiene Horror” on Weibo. In 2018 a 5-star hotel in China faced an online scandal after its staff was caught on video cleaning toilets and cups with used towels, which generated 3.1 billion views and 1.58 million discussions. The ongoing study aims to examine information transmission networks by understanding the types of users involved, the key informants, and how the crisis information spreads among different users. Her preliminary results show that there are differences between network clusters and hubs, and next steps of her study will combine the network characteristics with user profiles as well as analyze the information transmission process.
Luyu Wang, PhD student at UF presented Culture and Travel Experience in Natural Environments from Online User-Generated Content. The site studied is the Grand Canyon National Park, one of the largest natural attractions in the US. The study focuses on understanding how sentiments of experiences presented in online reviews (specially Trip Advisor) vary by the place of residence of the individual, what topics are mentioned by tourists in their reviews, and what the differences between tourists from different regions. The project analyzed reviews from the top 6 attractions in the park. The majority of the reviewers were American residents, and the second major group comes from European countries. Researchers identified negative (9) and positive topics (13) from the reviews, comparing the major topics pointed out by the different visitor groups. The results could help identify cultural perspectives in visitors, such as collectiveness vs. individualism, realism vs. pragmatism, and embracing vs. avoiding changes.
Shihan (David) Ma, also PhD candidate at UF, presented Review of tourism-oriented travel flows based on social media: reliability and validation, a study funded by the Florida Department of Transportation. The study uses new sources for tourism statistics, including big data such as user-generated social media data, device data (GPS, mobile roaming data) and operational data (web search and visiting, consumer card). Trips generated by tourists in Florida greatly impact the transportation system in the state, and the study has the objective of filling the gap on current information available to the department about tourists’ traffic flows by exploring the feasibility and reliability of social media data to extract this travel flows. After using an extensive data set, the researchers conclude that social media data is a feasible, reliable and representative source of data to retrieve travel flows of tourists, and could even related travel patterns with visitor profiles to identify interests in specific destinations. Additional study they plan to conduct will expand social media data to other languages to represent international visitors and will perform cross-validation with other official statistics (e.g. Visit Florida).
You can find the recording of the complete seminar here.
