A data-driven approach to exploring similarities of tourist attractions through online reviews

ABSTRACT

The motivation for tourists to visit a city is often driven by the uniqueness of the attractions accessible within the region. The draw to these locations varies by visitor as some travellers are interested in a single specific attraction while others prefer thematic travel. Tourists today have access to detailed experiences of other visitors to these locations in the form of user-contributed text reviews, opinions, photographs, and videos, all contributed through online tourism platforms. The data available through these platforms offer a unique opportunity to examine the similarities and difference between these attractions, their cities, and the visitors that contribute the reviews. In this work, we take a data-driven approach to assessing similarity through textual analysis of user-contributed reviews, uncovering nuanced differences and similarities in the ways that reviewers write about attractions and cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Similarity
• tourist attraction
• user-generated content
• topic model
• tripadvisor

Acknowledgements

Dr. Adams was partially supported by the Building Research Association of New Zealand through the National Science Challenge Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities: Ko ngā wā kāinga hei papakainga (BBHTC).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For consistency, we use the TripAdvisor designation Attraction here to indicate points of interest that are popular amongst travellers.

2. See http://www.mbie.govt.nz/info-services/sectors-industries/tourism/tourism-research-data/ivs.

3. e.g., https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g28970-Activities-_Washington_DC_District_of_ Columbia.html.

4. Custom scripts were written to access the content through the public TripAdvisor web platform.

5. A current list of TripAdvisor categories is accessible here: https://developer-tripadvisor.com/content-api/business-content/categories-subcategories-and-types.

6. Note that due to the uniqueness of cities, there was a range in overlap of attraction categories between cities.

7. The name given to those that contributed reviews anonymously.

8. http://www.geonames.org/export/free-geocoding.html.

9. The Commonwealth of Nations is an organisation of 52 member states, mostly former territories of the British Empire.