Social networks in tourism and cultural applications. Interaction technologies. Design, development, and evaluation of websites. Development of interactive websites. Participatory design. Fundamental principles of Human–Computer Interaction. Human-centered design. Development of participatory applications. Participatory design in cultural environments. Participatory virtual museums. Social data. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of social data. Case study: Tripadvisor.
Upon successful completion of the course, students are expected to have acquired and developed:
Knowledge enabling them to: (a) understand concepts such as co-creation of tourism experiences, marketing applications, social media analytics and big data, social listening, and natural language processing; (b) understand the value of information derived from social data and user-generated content; (c) be familiar with fundamental theories of natural language processing, including topic modelling and sentiment analysis; (d) identify the factors influencing tourist behavior and perception of a destination and propose improvements; (e) propose methodologies that enable the transformation of tourists from passive recipients and consumers of services into active participants and co-creators of information, offerings, and value.
Skills enabling them to: (a) process textual information from social networks (messages, comments, or tweets) and extract topics and sentiment; (b) use open-source tools to produce basic reports; (c) develop integrated presentations combining text, code, and visualizations (e.g., in the form of Jupyter notebooks) to present insights derived from data analysis.
Competences enabling them to: (a) identify sources of social media data; (b) formulate appropriate research questions and address them through the analysis of large-scale textual data.
Social media have significantly transformed the way people create, share, and discuss content, as well as with whom, how, when, and why they network and interact. As a result, social media strongly influence consumer behavior and decision-making processes, and consequently the ways in which businesses must communicate, build relationships, and deliver services to their customers. One of the fundamental changes brought about by social media is the transformation of customers from passive recipients and consumers of services into active participants and co-creators of information, offerings, and value. The rise of crowdsourcing and collaborative commerce (the so-called sharing economy) are characteristic examples of customer empowerment in the era of social media.
Information and interactions constitute the core of tourism and hospitality experiences, and thus tourism is no exception to such technological trends. Social media also represent a dynamic socio-material phenomenon, whose evolution, use, and impact are continuously influenced and shaped by technological, economic, and socio-cultural forces. In this context, research and practice related to social media must continuously follow, address, and anticipate change. The aim of this course is to address key areas in which research and industry practice have evolved within the context of social media in travel, tourism, and hospitality: co-creation of tourism experiences; marketing applications; and, last but not least, social media analytics and big data.
Analytical weekly breakdown of the course:
Part A: Social media applications for co-creation of value and customer experience
Week 1: Service-Dominant Logic in the social media landscape
Week 2: Value co-destruction in service ecosystems: insights from TripAdvisor
Week 3: Tourism innovations in social media: an opportunity for tourism organizations
Week 4: Social media: traveler behavior
Week 5: Marketing using social media applications and concepts. Case study: Guestflip
Part B: Social data analytics
Week 6: Introduction to natural language processing
Week 7: Word clouds and topic modeling
Week 8: Introduction to Python and Jupyter Notebook (libraries: spaCy and gensim)
Week 9: Introduction to sentiment analysis methods
Week 10: Business intelligence for destinations: generating insights from social media
Week 11: Case study: TripAdvisor
Week 12: Case study: Booking.com
Week 13: Case study: Twitter
- Recommended Bibliography:
The course aims to develop:
Student assessment will be conducted through:
Presentation / examination of a major assignment (100% of the final grade), which may include:
The assessment criteria are communicated to students at the beginning of the course.
Students are evaluated based on their ideas, the type of data selected, the questions formulated, and the persuasiveness of their responses.
Assessment results are accessible to students for feedback regarding their improvement.
Optionally, a peer-assessment scheme may be implemented.
