Abstract
Social media and user-generated content (UGC) have revolutionized tourism and hospitality communication and are seen as rich sources of information for destination image analysis. Many articles have been published about travel-related UGC, in particular, quantitative and qualitative content analysis of travel blogs and online travel reviews (OTR). Researchers have typically analysed small samples of population-representative travel diaries (tens or hundreds of files), which allow for manual processing. However, the enormous growth of OTRs requires operationalization through computerized methods, and the aim of this article is to propose a detailed method for semi-automatic downloading, arrangement, cleaning, debugging, and analysis of large-scale travel blogs and OTR data. This enables the classification of collected webpages by dates and destinations and offline content analysis of the text as written by the tourist. More than 130,000 useful trip diaries of tourists who visited Catalonia between 2004 and 2014 have been gathered, and significant results have been obtained in terms of content analysis in relation to destination image.
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