Cross-country analysis of tourist activities based on venue-referenced social media data

Insights into the activity preferences of specific tourist groups are crucial for tourism practitioners in developing appropriate travel packages that attract tourists and meet their expectations. Tourist activities across different countries often vary depending on what these destinations can offer. Existing attempts to obtain comprehensive information on tourist activities across multiple countries often fail because of the limitations of traditional data collection approaches, which are heavily reliant on surveys and questionnaires. This study proposes to address the challenge by introducing a new type of data called venue-referenced social media data (VR-SMD), which can effectively determine various tourist activities and the temporal preferences for each activity at different destinations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VR-SMD using a case study that focuses on Malaysian outbound travelers. Their cross-cultural differences from another travel group, namely, Thai outbound travelers, are highlighted through a comparative analysis. Analysis results provide valuable insights for various tourism applications.