As standards of living improve, people are placing an increasing emphasis on leisure, dynamically seeking ways to relax and eliminate stress. This is why travel has become a popular leisure activity. Numerous factors influence the destination choice, including advertising campaigns, travel agency promotions, airline ticket discounting, movies or TV programs, personal preferences and word of mouth.
In particular, the Internet has dramatically changed the competitive dynamics of the lodging industry, since a continuously growing number of tourists use this technology to collect useful information for their travels. Marketers, who have long sought to harness and manage interactions such as these to their own advantage, have recently begun to consider and devise strategies to manage online interpersonal influence.
Especially hospitality and tourism marketers find the issue of critical importance in view of the fact that recent research has demonstrated the influence of both positive and negative word of mouth upon tourism products in studies across a broad range of nations.
I think marketers in the tourism market cannot ignore word-of-mouth today and therefore cannot ignore what is being said on the blogsphere about specific locations and type of accommodations.
Competition is increasing in the tourism industry as tourism businesses move into the electronic marketplace. Increased competition calls for more customer orientation. One way to obtain competitive advantage is trough customer satisfaction, a factor of increasing importance in the more competitive electronic markets.
Today users can easily spread their comments and complaints which, in turn, can significantly affect a company’s image. Electronic word of-mouth is a useful tool to disseminate positive and negative observations on companies and brands via websites, chat rooms, and consumer forums.
Tourism organisations need to recognise these changes and to develop personalised services to address individual needs. Proactive services may be offered based on the anticipated needs resulting from known and declared or previously experienced customer profiles. Although a number of research studies regarding web sites relating to the tourism/hospitality industry have been conducted worldwide, few have been found that deal specifically with consumers’ opinion and the way brands or travel operators react to positive or negative word-of-mouth. I think the tourism industry still lacks in analyzing and gaining marketing intelligence from social media, underestimating the potentials of brand engagement in the blogsphere.
This is why I believe tourism organizations should investigate sentiment analysis software, capable of helping in re-arranging marketing campaigns “on-the-fly” with best practices.
What I think is important, especially to tourism agencies, is the ability to analyze and react in near real time. The majority of tools available today are SaaS based web application that enable users to define search terms (products, services, company names, brand names, etc.) and configuration parameters from a browser.
When a sentiment analysis software identifies an article relevant to a query topic (such as “Ischia Island”), it first retrieves blogs and news articles relevant to Ischia Island and then analyzes their content using a mix of natural language processing and statistical methods.
Finally, another interesting point is to compare and contrast findings between different time periods, since consumers change their perception frequently. What could be of great impact could be the integration of sentiment analysis tools with existing marketing applications.
Anyone has used commercial sentiment analysis tools for tourism marketing?
