User generated content: the use of blogs for tourism organisations and tourism consumers

By G. Akehurst. 2009

462 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the World Wide Web has developed considerable bargaining power has been transferred from suppliers to consumers; there is a real need to improve market intelligence and market research for private and public tourism organisations and facilitate timely consumer decision making. This article explores the development of user generated content and specifically the use of web logs or blogs. Tourism organisations cannot afford to ignore the development of user generated content, peer-to-peer web applications and virtual communities. A recent survey found that consumers trusted more websites with reviews than professional guides and travel agencies and far from being an irrelevance, blogs are often perceived to be more credible and trustworthy than traditional marketing communications. But there is a problem: given the sheer number of possibly relevant travel blogs there is a need to locate, extract and interpret blog content and this has proven so far to be time consuming, exhausting and costly, thus negating the relative value of the information obtained. A way forward may be the use of artificial intelligence and “opinion mining” or a blog visualisation system.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aca531c167eaecd8a75f1131a4caf42d6c279a9b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Weilin Lu
2. R. Law
3. Markus Schuckert
4. R. Buckley
5. H. Perkins
6. B. Sparks
7. Alireza Alaei
8. Xianwei Liu

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Weilin Lu
2. Markus Schuckert
3. R. Law
4. Xianwei Liu
5. R. Buckley
6. H. Perkins
7. Susanne Becken
8. Alireza Alaei

Citations in the corpus

• The evolution of sentiment analysis - A review of research topics, venues, and top cited papers (2016, background): “Akehurst [Akehurst 2009] examines the relation of blogs and tourism in scientific literature, which matches several topics under class Travel from Section 3.5.3.”
• Sentiment Analysis in Tourism: Capitalizing on Big Data (2019, background): “Information provided through these independent platforms has been found to be superior and more trustworthy compared with companies’ websites and professional reviews (Akehurst, 2009; Gretzel et al., 2007; Rabanser & Ricci, 2005; Xiang et al., 2009).”
• Hospitality and Tourism Online Reviews: Recent Trends and Future Directions (2015, methodology): “Here, a way forward is the use of artificial intelligence and the opinion mining technique (Akehurst, 2009).”
• User-Generated Content as a Research Mode in Tourism and Hospitality Applications: Topics, Methods, and Software (2015, background): “Thus, locating and collecting UGC have been identified as one of the challenges that researchers face (Akehurst, 2009; Kline, Barreda, Gerdes, & Gregory, 2010).”
• Online travel reviews as persuasive communication: The effects of content type, source, and certification logos on consumer behavior (2013, background): “Consumers can, and increasingly do, share experiences directly with other consumers through electronic word of mouth (Akehurst, 2009).”