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ABSTRACT
In this Web 2.0 era, various and massive tourist experiences and reviews presented on social networks have become important information for tourism research. In this paper, we apply social media to explore and study the tourism industry of Bamako, Mali. Over 2000 reviewers and their comments about Bamako’s hotels and restaurants from TripAdvisor and Facebook were collected. Also, we integrate official tourism statistic data and field surveying data into the online review dataset. Data mining and statistic method are used to analyze the data for purpose of exploring the characteristics about tourism industry in Bamako. And we find that: (i) Most tourists are coming to Bamako for business purpose, and they incline to choose the hotels with better service and security condition; (ii) Comments on social media would greatly affect travelers’ choice on hotels; (iii) Most travelers are satisfied about Bamako’s accommodation services.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant number 2017YFB0503700) and the National Nature Science Foundation of China (grant number 41501439).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sanogo Bruno
Sanogo Bruno, Geographer Administrator of Agence pour la Promotion Touristique du Mali (APTM), is a PhD candidate of Geographic Information System (GIS) at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan. His research interests cover the areas of Big data analysis, text mining, social media, spatial analysis.
Chao Yang
Chao Yang, PhD, is Associate Professor in the School of Geography and Information Engineering at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan. He received PhD degree in Geography Information System(GIS) from Wuhan University at 2012. His research interests include data mining, text analytics, social media analytics for human geography studies.
Wenwen Tian
Wenwen Tian is faculty in the School of Geography and Information Engineering at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan. She received Ph.D. degree in Geography Information System(GIS) from Wuhan University at 2013. Her research interests include data mining, geospatial analytics, and Geo-computation.
Zhong Xie
Zhong Xie, PhD, is Professor in the School of Information Engineering at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan. His research interests include geospatial analytics and Geo-computation.
Yuanzheng Shao
Yuanzheng Shao is Associate Professor in the Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology, Wuhan University. He received PhD degree in Geography Information System(GIS) from Wuhan University at 2011. His research interests include geospatial analytics and Geo-computation.