Big Data Analytics for Tourism Destinations

The objective of this chapter is to address the above deficiencies in tourism by presenting the concept of the tourism knowledge destination – a specific knowledge management architecture that supports value creation through enhanced supplier interaction and decision making. Information from heterogeneous data sources categorized into explicit feedback (e.g. tourist surveys, user ratings) and implicit information traces (navigation, transaction and tracking data) is extracted by applying semantic mapping, wrappers or text mining (Lau et al., 2005). Extracted data are stored in a central data warehouse enabling a destination-wide and all-stakeholder-encompassing data analysis approach. By using machine learning techniques interesting patterns are detected and knowledge is generated in the form of validated models (e.g. decision trees, neural networks, association rules, clustering models). These models, together with the underlying data (in the case of exploratory data analysis) are interactively visualized and made accessible to destination stakeholders.