Fifth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Nowadays, Internet new technologies and mobile communications allow tourists to share their experiences more easily. Tourists broadcast their photos, videos, stories, and anecdotes through websites such as blogs, forums, traveler communities (TripAdvisor) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter and so on). This information produced by the tourists, who have already traveled, affects potential tourists’ beliefs. Likewise, tourists co-produce signals which influence places’ geographical, touristic imaginaries, practices and experiences. The present paper does a bigdata analyze 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 bigdata analysis, it possible to highlight the relations between different places but also to know the discourse tourists share about their travel practices and experiences.