Online popularity of destinations in Australia: An application of Polya Urn process to search engine data

Abstract

The online search engine is a key source of tourism information for trip planning. In the internet, experience and feedback shared by previous tourists can be obtained with increasing ease, resulting in a feedback mechanism of interpersonal influence featured in the online peer-to-peer tourism information exchange. Such interpersonal influence may lead to a unique popularity distribution among destinations. The information exchange process is also affected by the destination choice set, which is determined by the geography of the destination countries. This study mathematically characterised the e-word-of-mouth effect in travel and tourism on the pattern formation in online destination. To achieve this, the Polya Urn process is invoked to model the clustering of destination preference and the distribution of destination popularity in an online environment. Google search volume on various destinations in Australia and France from five tourism inbound countries are used. Results show that the theoretical distribution of the Polya Urn process fits the distribution of search volume on Australian destinations, highlighting the geographical uniqueness of Australia as a closed system that possess a unique online popularity growth process and distribution.