Exploring the characteristics of tourism industry by analyzing consumer review contents from social media: a case study of Bamako, Mali

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.