The use of user-generated content for business intelligence in tourism: insights from an analysis of Croatian hotels*

Abstract

Web-based peer review sites are gaining importance in travellers’ decision-making and provide information for destinations' management. Textual reviews are especially important, but very extensive and hard to process. This article discusses the benefits of recent developments in computational linguistics and shows it can be used, based on a study of 18,000 reviews of Croatian hotels. Results show that numerical evaluation rarely provides sufficient information, while textual reviews reveal details about facilities’ competitive (dis)advantages. Being very extensive, the reviews are difficult to use. By applying computational linguistics the study illustrates how the information can be summarised and used in decision-making. The study extends the application of computational linguistics methodology to tourism literature and provides the first extensive analysis of TripAdvisor data for Croatia.