Fourth International Conference on Tourism and Leisure Studies

Abstract

Nowadays, Internet new technologies and mobile communications allow tourists to share their experiences more easily. Tourists broadcast their pictures, videos, stories and anecdotes through websites such as: websites to share pictures, blogs, forums, traveler communities (TripAdvisor) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter and so on). This information produced by the tourists, who have already traveled, will affect potential tourists’ beliefs. Likewise, tourists co-produce signals which influence places’ geographical, touristic choices, practices and experiences. The present paper does a Big data analysis of tourist experiences in Colombia. For this we used all TripAdvisor reviews of Colombian attractions, we have drawn trajectories between the places reviewed by tourists and we analyze the reviews or micro-narratives in different languages. As a result, we recognized the trajectories at national, regional and local levels, and we identified several topics in common among the linguistic groups analyzed (English, Spanish, French and Portuguese) but at the same time there are particular topics that are interesting in each linguistic group. With Big data analysis, it possible to highlight the relations between different places but also to know the discourse tourists share about their travel practices and experiences.