Best Paper Award for Social Media Analyses in Tourism

Together with students, Professor Dr. Wolfram Höpken has developed a novel approach for estimating tourist arrivals based on user-generated content. The work was presented at the ENTER23 tourism conference in South Africa and promptly won the Best Paper Award.

Compared to other industries, tourism is a highly volatile business with significant fluctuations in demand. Long-term trends are overshadowed by seasonal fluctuations. In addition, crises such as the Corona pandemic or natural disasters lead to irregular sometimes even dramatic fluctuations in demand, threatening livelihoods in the tourism industry.

Real-time monitoring through user-generated content

While long-term trends and seasonal fluctuations can be adequately forecast using relatively simple approaches, irregular fluctuations in demand such as those caused by the Corona pandemic are almost impossible to predict. Even if a crisis has already occurred, the current extent of the decline in demand is usually not known because tourism statistics are only available with a long time lag. So what is missing from a company's point of view is real-time monitoring of tourism demand that makes fluctuations transparent even in exceptional situations.

User-generated content (UGC), especially reviews on online platforms such as TripAdvisor or Booking.com, is increasingly used by tourists to provide feedback during or shortly after their trip. The feedbacks usually occur within 24 to 48 hours. TripAdvisor, for example, includes over one billion reviews and opinions for tourism businesses.

Award in South Africa

Because UGC usage can be monitored directly on online review platforms, UGC volume can be monitored in real time. Assuming that a stable proportion of tourists provide feedback on review platforms, UGC represents a promising input to estimate current tourism demand as a means of real-time monitoring.

Based on these considerations, Professor Dr. Wolfram Höpken together with Nadine Liedtke and Dominic Regitz, students of Digital Business, developed a novel approach to estimate tourist arrivals based on UGC on travel platforms. The results show that the approach can forecast arrivals 27 % more accurately than conventional approaches, especially in a crisis situation like the pandemic.

Wolfram Höpken presented the results at the ENTER23 tourism conference in Johannesburg and was awarded first place in the Best Paper Award.

The full paper is available here.