=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1748/paper-12
|storemode=property
|title=Social Media Data Analytics for Tourism -- A Preliminary Study
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1748/paper-12.pdf
|volume=Vol-1748
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/kdweb/DhirataraYBH16
}}
==Social Media Data Analytics for Tourism -- A Preliminary Study==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1748/paper-12.pdf
Social Media Data Analytics for Tourism
A Preliminary Study
Arkka Dhiratara, Jie Yang, Alessandro Bozzon, Geert-Jan Houben
Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628CD, Delft, The Netherlands
A.Dhiratara@student.tudelft.nl,
{J.Yang-3, A.Bozzon, G.J.P.M.Houben}@tudelft.nl
Abstract. Social media data are increasingly used as the source of re-
search in a variety of domains. A typical example is urban analytics,
which aims at solving urban problems by analyzing data from different
sources including social media. The potential value of social media data
in tourism studies, which is one of the key topics in urban research, how-
ever has been much less investigated. This paper seeks to understand the
relationship between social media dynamics and the visiting patterns of
visitors to touristic locations in real-world cases. By conducting a com-
parative study, we demonstrate how social media characterizes touristic
locations differently from other data sources. Our study further shows
that social media data can provide real-time insights of tourists’ visiting
patterns in big events, thus contributing to the understanding of social
media data utility in tourism studies.
1 Introduction
Today, our society is increasingly hyper-connected with the unprecedented rise
of social media; currently, social media has 2.206 Billion active users with 30%
global penetration1 . Social media activities are therefore an important class of
daily activities performed by people worldwide to fulfill their social needs. These
social media activities have generated a wealth of social data, which can provide
meaningful and even possibly, real-time insights to a variety of studies. Social me-
dia has thus been leveraged as part of marketing strategy for industries, through
“passive marketing” (as sources of market intelligence to gain insights of the
users) [7]. As Mangold and Faulds (2009) recommend, social media should be
regarded as an integral part of an organization’s marketing strategy and should
not be taken lightly [14].
Among different domains, urban science has been shown as an important
domain where social media data can contribute [8, 5]. A wide range of urban
problems have been studied with social media data, including event detection
[13], urban area characterization [8], to mention a few. The potential of social
media data, however, has been much less investigated in the study of tourism,
despite the fact that tourism plays a key role in economic and social development
1
http://wearesocial.com/uk/special-reports/global-statshot-august-2015
of many cities. Social media data are intrinsically different compared with other
data sources used for tourism studies [18][11], such as visitor survey, transporta-
tion statistics, or online reviews. They either require a considerable amount of
laborious effort for data acquirement – thus are infrequently updated, or require
a large amount of volunteer input from online users, thus are highly sparse. Dif-
ferent from them, social media data are easily accessible in big size; moreover,
they are topically, and spatially and temporally tagged, thus providing a distinct
opportunity for tourism studies.
On the other hand, the high availability of social media data raises some
challenges. In order to retrieve relevant social data, one should take into account
effective parameters for data filtering, such as hashtags, keywords or geographic
boundaries/coordinates. When it comes to tourism studies, the selection of pa-
rameters is crucial and needs to be carefully designed, to avoid biasing the inter-
pretation of the results. For example, to capture the popularity of Eiffel Tower in
Paris w.r.t. the number of visitors, we should avoid only using keywords or hash-
tags (e.g. #EiffelTower, #TourEiffel, or #Eiffel) to filter the data, as we cannot
assume whether people posting tweets with these hashtags are indeed currently
visiting that location. In this case, geographic coordinates become necessarily to
be used as an additional parameter for filtering social media data.
By carefully selecting the parameters for filtering social media data, we cre-
ated a dataset to explore the potential of social media data for tourism studies.
Specifically, we focus on Instagram, which has been shown to be highly popu-
lar among tourists [22] as it features creating and sharing visual content (i.e.
images) by users. We then seek to answer the following research questions:
RQ1. How does social media data characterize touristic location differently
from other data sources?
RQ2. Can social media data provide real-time insights about visiting patterns
of tourists to different tourist locations in big events?
We tackle these questions by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the
social media data we collected from Instagram. By comparing the social data
results with official tourism statistics and online review data, we find that so-
cial media characterizes touristic locations differently, featuring more landmark
locations. Our study further shows that, during big events, social media data
can characterize the visiting patterns of tourists at different locations with high
temporal resolution, thus contributing to the understanding of how social media
data can be used for obtaining real-time insights for touristic locations.
Our study provides preliminary however useful results that support social
media as a useful data source for tourism studies. In 2014, World Travel Tourism
Council (WTTC) stated that tourism industry has contributed US$7.6 trillion
and also support 276 million jobs across the globe [21]. Because of the high
economical and societal relevance, governments and the tourism industry are
devoted to attracting more tourists to visit their cities’ touristic locations [10].
The results of this work can be of fundamental interests for tourism marketing
and decision making using social media data.
2 Related Works
Social media data analytics. The unprecedented popularity of social media
has offered opportunities for a variety of domains. An important application is
user modeling, for which social media data has been shown to be useful for mod-
eling user attributes, including personal traits and personality [4], their interests
[2], and etc.. In addition, social media data have also been shown to be effective
for detecting social trends, including hot topics [15], cultural fashion trends [12] ,
and even epidemic burst [9]. Different from existing studies, we focus on tourism
analytics using social media data in this work.
Social media data in urban analytics. While little work can be found in
tourism studies, social data has enabled a wealth of research works in urban
analytics. These include using social data for event-detection [13], venue recom-
mendation for city-scale events [5], characterizing mobility patterns [6] in cities,
and etc.. These works aim to show the effectiveness of social data for character-
izing urban environment and human behaviour in cities. Falling in this line of
research, the potential of social media in tourism studies, however, remains to
be investigated.
Data sources for tourism studies. United Nations and European Union have
provided guidelines and recommendation regarding the comprehensive method-
ological framework for collection and compiling of tourism statistics [18, 11].
Among different data sources for tourism study, visitor survey and transporta-
tion statistics are the ones used the most. In addition to this, some tourism
studies focus on data from online review websites, e.g. TripAdvisor [17, 16, 3].
While being relevant, data from these review websites are highly sparse [3], due
to the nature that they require volunteer input from online users. Recent studies
[3] have shown a limited value of these data in tourism research.
3 Methods
In 2015, France was one of the top touristic destinations over the world [20],
with more than 83 million tourist arrivals. In addition, the city of Paris itself
also ranked as the most visited city in the world [19]. Therefore, this paper will
scope the sample of touristic locations within the city of Paris (France). This
section introduces our method in creating the dataset for answering our research
questions, including the official tourism statistics, TripAdvisor statistics, and
Instagram data.
3.1 Official Tourism Statistics and TripAdvisor
We are interested in understanding the characteristics of data from social media,
compared with those from other data sources. To this end, we first determined
the touristic locations considered in our study. We chose the top-5 touristic lo-
cations based on their popularity in Paris’ annual visitor statistic [1] and in Tri-
pAdvisor. Table 1 reports the descriptive statistics of these locations, including
the annual visitors according to the official report, and the number of reviewers
in TripAdvisor.
Comparing the popularity of touristic locations in the official report and
in TripAdvisor, we can find that touristic locations have different popularity
between the one reported by official statistics and the one observed through
TripAdvisor. In particular, while there are more visitors in Cathedral than Eif-
fel Tower according to the official report, Eiffel Tower appears to be the one
reviewed more often on TripAdvisor. In addition, different museums also show
different popularity: Musée du Louvre is more popular than Musée d’Orsay in
terms of visitors. However, people tend to review Musée d’Orsay more often on
TripAdvisor. These observations clearly show a difference between the reality
(official statistics) and statistics from the online review platform (TripAdvisor).
# Touristic Locations Official Statistic TripAdvisor
Visitors Reviews
1 Notre Dame Cathedral 14,300,000 42,442
2 Musée du Louvre 9,134,000 58,648
3 Eiffel Tower 7,097,302 79,198
4 Musée d’Orsay 3,480,609 40,640
5 Arc de Triomphe 1,200,000 23,689
Table 1: Touristic locations in Paris: annual visitors reported by the official
statistic, and number of reviewers in TripAdvisor.
3.2 Instagram Data
This work requires data acquisition from Instagram as the main object of study.
Currently, Instagram has provided access to their API Endpoints2 through which
developers are able to interact with its data. Unfortunately, due to the change of
Instagram’s platform policy starting on 17 November 2015, every newly created
app won’t have full access of the API Endpoint (Sandbox Mode)3 . Developers are
required to submit their applications through a review process to be granted will
full API access, which requires a long period of time. Therefore, we developed
an alternative method here to track real-time posts available on Instagram, that
was, using its search function.
Instagram’s search function enables us to find photos based on keyword.
Moreover, Instagram website provides “explore” feature that enables a user to
explore trending and recent posts on a specified location based on the Location-
2
https://www.instagram.com/developer/
3
http://developers.instagram.com/post/133424514006/
instagram-platform-update
Fig. 1: Instagram’s Explore page: The Eiffel Tower (Location-Id 218177821).
Id4 . An example of the Location page is shown in Figure 1. By using web-
scrapping techniques we were able to retrieve photos and auxiliary information
required for this study, including Timestamp, User-Id and Location-Id.
Determine Relevant Location-Id. Instagram allows users to tag location
information to photos. In doing this, users get automatically location tag recom-
mendations based on their locations or photos’ coordinates. We leveraged such
location tags to filter relevant posts for this study. Particularly, we noticed that
a single location can have multiple Location-Ids. For example, if we want to find
Instagram’s posts located at The Eiffel Tower we could find it on Location-Id
216052603, as well as Location-Id 2593354, which is the French version of the
name Tour Eiffel. To cope with this problem, we proposed to merge multiple
Location-Ids for individual touristic locations, in order to gain more data and to
avoid biasing the interpretation of the results: including either only the English
and the French version of the Location-Id of The Eiffel Tower, the results will
be biased to specific type of people speaking English or French.
The discovery of available Location-Ids was performed as follows. First, we
queried Instagram’s posts based on keyword and/or hash-tags. Second, based on
the retrieved posts we were able to identify a list of frequently used Location-Ids
4
E.g., The Eiffel Tower: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/
218177821/.
(> 100 posts) for specific touristic locations. As a result, we were able to find
relevant Instagram’s Location-Ids for each tourist destination considered in our
study.
Tapping on Instagram’s Recent Media Stream. After identifying the
Location-Ids of every touristic location in our study, we built a crawler to scrap
Instagram’s explore page5 using Location-Ids as the parameters. As a result,
we were able to retrieve 898,339 Instagram posts. However, when analyzing the
retrieved data based on post’s timestamp, we found that the number of photos
older than one month decreases dramatically. This pattern could happen either
because of Instagram’s own policy that not revealing all old photos or because
of the feature itself only just available since June 20156 .
140000
120000
100000
# Posts
80000
60000
40000
20000
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Okt Nov Dec
Month
Fig. 2: Crawled Instagram’s posts per month in 2015.
As a result of this finding, we used only recent retrieved posts that were
not older than 14 days (from 25 December 2015 to 7 January 2016) to ensure
reliability. We leave it to future work, to scrap the website for a longer period of
time. The resulting data set contains 82,381 posts7 .
5
https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/
6
http://blog.instagram.com/post/122260662827/150623-search-and-explore
7
The dataset has been made available to the community at: https://github.com/
arkka/tourism-analytics
Arc de Triomphe
Musee d'Orsay
10.0%
1.1%
Musee du Louvre
22.8%
51.5% Tour Eiffel
14.6%
Notre Dame de Paris
Fig. 3: Top tourist locations in Paris based on Instagram’s posts.
4 Results
We now discuss our findings corresponding to the research questions.
4.1 How does Social Media Data Characterize Touristic Locations
Differently from Other Data Sources?
In order to answer RQ1, we first construct a ranking list of the considered
touristic locations according to their popularity in Instagram. Specifically for
each touristic location, we count the number of related posts, to be used as a
measure of its popularity in social media. Next, we compare this ranking list
with the one in official tourism report and that in TripAdvisor.
Comparing Metrics. To quantitatively compare the ranking list of touristic
locations from different data sources, we used a well-accepted measure of non-
parametric rank correlations, namely Kendall’s τ rank correlation, which is based
on pair-wise agreements between touristic locations. The result shows that there
is no correlation (< 0.1, with p-value > 0.1) between the ranking list of official
report and that of social media. Comparing with the ranking from TripAdvisor,
we find a moderate correlation between social media and TripAdvisor (= 0.59,
p-value = 0.14). We next qualitatively analyze the similarity and dissimilarity
among data from different sources, as we will see later.
Social Media vs. Official Statistic. It is interesting to see how the relative
ranking positions of different tourist locations differ in social media list and the
official list of tourism statistics. In particular, official tourism statistics reveals
that Notre Dame Cathedral and Muse du Louvre have more visitors than The
Eiffel Tower, however in social media the most popular one is The Eiffel Tower
for both Instagram and Tripadvisor. A possible reason for this would be that
tourists are more opt to take a photo on landmark touristic locations without
entering the attraction such as museums or monuments. Following this kind
of scenario, we are able to leverage social media data to complement existing
official statistics. Social media is able to identify trends independently without
the needs of conventional visitor counting methods, such as using ticket sales
or gate counters. Moreover, social media also able to provide high temporal
resolution data that we can leverage to enhance our analysis which we explore
in the later section.
Instagram vs. TripAdvisor. Comparing the popularity of touristic locations
between TripAdvisor’s user reviews and Instagram’s posts, we find that there are
certain amount of similarities between these statistic . Both of these statistics
rank The Eiffel Tower as the most popular touristic locations, followed by Musée
du Louvre and Notre Dame Cathedral respectively. The difference can be found
for Musée d’Orsay and Arc de Triomphe, which respectively rank at the fourth
and fifth in TripAdvisor, but it is the other way around on Instagram. Overall,
it is interesting knowing the fact that these two different data sources can relate
with each other. The similarity between TripAdvisor and Instagram data could
be because that both are user-generated. In the following, we will analyze in
detail the utility of social media data in providing fine-grained temporal insights
for tourism studies.
4.2 Evolution of Touristic Location Popularity During New Year’s
Eve
Social media has been shown to be effective as sensors for detecting collective
trends of societal events [7, 9]. However, the potential for real-time event sensing
is less investigated. We now study RQ2, that is, how social media can reflect real-
time dynamics of the popularity of touristic locations in big events. Specifically,
we focus on the social media activities around different touristic locations in
New Year’s Eve and investigate how their popularity change over time.
Figure 4 shows the dynamics of the popularity of the top touristic locations
in Paris within two weeks from Dec. 25th, 2015 to Jan. 7th, 2016 on a daily base.
We can observe different visiting patterns of these considered touristic locations,
according to the evolution of popularity before, during, and after New Year’s Eve.
In particular, the popularity of The Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe drastically
increases during New Year’s Eve in terms of the number of Instagram posts. In
contrast, the popularity of Musée du Louvre deceases during New Year’s Eve.
Therefore with social data we could draw the conclusion that The Eiffel Tower
and Arc de Triomphe are the ones attract more social activities from visitors
during the big event, while Musée du Louvre loses social attention during the
same period of time. A possible reason could be that people are more likely
6000
Arc de Triomphe
Musee d'Orsay
5000 Musee du Louvre
Notre Dame de Paris
Tour Eiffel
4000
# Posts
3000
2000
1000
0
15
2
2
2
2
2
2
16
1
1
1
1
1
1
26/1
27/1
28/1
29/1
30/1
31/1
02/0
03/0
04/0
05/0
06/0
07/0
2/20
1/20
25/1
01/0
Date
Fig. 4: Daily number of visitor trends on 2016 New Years Eve.
450 450
Arc de Triomphe Arc de Triomphe
400 Musee d'Orsay 400 Musee d'Orsay
Musee du Louvre Musee du Louvre
350 Notre Dame de Paris 350 Notre Dame de Paris
Tour Eiffel Tour Eiffel
300 New Year's Eve 300 New Year's Eve
250 250
# Posts
# Posts
200 200
150 150
100 100
50 50
0 0
15
15
15
15
6
6
6
6
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1/1/1
2/1/1
3/1/1
4/1/1
00:0
04:0
08:0
12:0
16:0
20:0
00:0
04:0
08:0
12:0
16:0
20:0
2/20
2/20
2/20
2/20
Hour
28/1
29/1
30/1
31/1
Hour
(a) Dec. 25th, 2015 – Jan. 7th, 2016 (b) 2016 New Year’s Eve.
Fig. 5: The popularity of touristic locations over time, aggregated in each hour.
to celebrate big events in landmark attractions (e.g. The Eiffel Tower and Arc
de Triomphe) than museums. We leave it to the future work to find out more
characteristics of touristic locations according to their corresponding visiting
patterns during big events.
4.3 Daily Visiting Patterns of Tourist Locations during New Year’s
Day
Social media data allow us to analyze fine-grained patterns of user activities
with high temporal resolution. We now analyze the visiting patterns of people
to touristic locations on hourly base.
Daily Visiting Pattern. Figure 5a shows the visiting frequency of people to
touristic locations during the week centred at New Year’s Day, observed through
Instagram. we could observe that in normal days (excluding New Year’s Eve)
number of Instagram’s posts peaked at 9-10PM on each day. In contrast, we
have found a drastic change of daily visiting pattern on New Year’s Eve, which
is moved earlier to 6PM on 31 December 2015 and followed by another peak
on the next day at 1AM with a huge number of posts compared to the rest of
other peaks. After the New Year’s Eve (1 January 2016) we could observe that
the daily visiting pattern comes back normal as usual in the evening, which is
peaked at 9PM. These observations indicate a distinct visiting pattern of people
to touristic locations on New Year’s Day, differing from other days before and
after. Moreover, this figure also shows the distribution of each post by touristic
locations. Overall, The Eiffel Tower consistently has the highest number of posts
compared others, which followed by Musée du Louvre and Notre Dame Cathedral
respectively.
Using high temporal data that we have retrieved from social media, we are
able to relate the number of posts on specific touristic locations with their open-
ing hours. For example, the opening time of Musée du Louvre is from 9am to
6pm every day except on January 1, May 1 and December 258 . Based on the
hourly visitor trends depicted on figure 5b, we could see that the number of
posts increases dramatically on 9am until reaching it’s peak on 6pm and then
decreases dramatically when reaching the closing hour on 6pm. We could inter-
pret that as during New Year’s eve, people tend to visit a touristic location that
has no restrictive opening hours, which usually is an outdoor touristic location,
such as The Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe, instead of museums in Paris
such as Musée du Louvre that are closed on the 1st January 2016. Therefore,
it is clear that social data is able to provide additional data and insights that
complement the existing official statistics.
Visiting Patterns of Different Touristic Locations on New Year’s Eve.
Based on the previous analysis, we have noticed that there is a difference visiting
pattern on New Year’s Eve and normal days. On figure 5b, we focused our anal-
ysis from 31 December 2015 to 1 January 2016 to identify the trend. Consistent
with previous results, this figure shows that on New Year’s Eve people are more
likely to celebrate at The Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. Moreover, Arc
de Triomphe become the second-most popular touristic location for celebrating
New Year’s Eve. In contrast, Musée du Louvre which is usually the second-most
popular touristic location on a normal day becomes less popular on New Year’s
Eve. These observations indicate that people tend to be selective in celebrating
the big event, favouring more at landmark locations than museums.
5 Threat to Validity
This study aims to explore the potential of social media data in tourism studies.
The main limitation (and a threat to validity) is the size of the data we collect.
8
http://www.louvre.fr/en/hours-admission/admission
This relates to several important factors, including the length of the time period
of the data, the number of city and touristic locations we consider in the data.
It would be highly interesting to compare the touristic locations in different
cities, which we leave for the future work. Second, due to Instagram’s Public
API limitation, we couldn’t explore the full potential of Instagram data using
the API. In this paper, we stress our effort in creating the trustable data crawler,
and testing the reliability of the data.
6 Conclusions
While social media has open many research opportunities in urban analytic,
the value in the tourism studies has been much less explored and remains an
open question. This paper takes a first step towards understanding the utility
of social media data in urban tourism studies. We show that social media can
provide different reflections of the tourism from other data sources, including
official tourism report and online review platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor); moreover,
we find that social media data can provide real-time insights of tourists’ visiting
patterns during big events. In conclusion, our study provides a set of preliminary
results that support social media as a useful data source for touristic marketing
and decision making.
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