Big Data, Business Intelligence and Tourism:

a brief analysis of the literature

Rodolfo Baggio
Master in Economics and Tourism
Bocconi University, Milan, Italy
rodolfo.baggio@unibocconi.it
paper presented at:
IFITTtalk@Östersund: Big Data & Business Intelligence in the Travel & Tourism Domain.
ETOUR, Mid-Sweden University, Östersund (SE), 11-12 April 2016

1 Problem Definition
Big Data is, today, a very popular buzzword (a Google search provides more than 55 million
items containing the expression). The term identifies, as known, the massive volume of both
structured and unstructured data apparently available on the Web and difficult to process using
traditional software techniques or by using traditional statistical methods. It is a rapidly
emerging field of inquiry, often hailed as a crucial factor for increasing economic prosperity and
understanding or resolving societal problems (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013).
Big Data (BD) are considered by many an incredible opportunity for its supposed capacity to
provide answers to practically any question that could be asked about people’s behaviours,
views and feelings. As a matter of fact, it is rather surprising to see that a phenomenon once
considered causing puzzlement and confusion, the so called information overload, once changed
name into Big Data is now believed to be a kind of silver bullet, able to provide a wealth of
valuable and unquestionable insights into many aspects of the modern life of individuals,
organisations and markets (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; McAfee et al., 2012).
Many of these claims, though, look more than reasonable and, actually, the capability to
examine complex phenomena by combining so widely available sources of information can be a
remarkable advantage for those who can fully exploit them (Bedeley & Nemati, 2014).
On the other hand, BD present a good number of challenges and risks, well discussed in a
number of works (Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Fan et al., 2014; McFarland & McFarland, 2015).
They mainly refer to the technical and methodological difficulties in treating so large volumes
of rapidly changing sets of data. Besides that, there is a need for a good set of specialised skills
and resources, and a different approach is deemed necessary with respect to the one that for the
last centuries has characterised the collection and the analysis of data (Chen et al., 2014).
Nonetheless, scholars and practitioners overall agree that there are remarkable benefits in
having access to a vast amount of data that cover practically any aspect of human life, mainly
because they are “spontaneously” generated so do not suffer from selection biases that can be
present in traditional investigation methods. In any case, even taking into account the
methodological issues, BD can be a useful and important complement to more stable, rigorous
research methods (Kitchin & Lauriault, 2015).
Big Data have also started to be a source for Business Intelligence (BI) activities. The tradition
of BI analytics is longer, but the field is very sensitive to all data and information sources that
can provide a better return on the investment. Therefore both subjects are highly
complementary. Advanced analytics and better and richer sources can provide a deeper
perspective on the data, that can benefit from more structured and rigorous experience. The
interpretation layer provided by business intelligence can thus be crucial to making advanced
BD analytics actionable (Liebowitz, 2013).
In the last years, tourism has widely recognised the need for a more customer-focused approach,
that primarily values tourists’ needs, preferences and requirements in order to increase the
goodness of their experience and achieve a better satisfaction, that turns out to be an important
determinant in all travel choices and decisions (Correia et al., 2013; Prayag et al., 2013).
Given these premises, the question is: to what extent is tourism academia aware of, and is
working on these subjects?
To answer, at least partially, this question this short note presents the results of an analysis of
the recent literature on Big Data and business intelligence and the application of the related
techniques to the field of travel, tourism, hospitality and leisure.

2 Materials and Methods

The source for this work is the Scopus database. Although, obviously, not a complete source of
academic works, with its more than 20,000 titles from about 5,000 international publishers, it
can be well considered one of the most comprehensive repository of the world’s research output
across a wide range of fields. To this we add the IFITT digital library
(http://www.ifitt.org/resources/digital-library/) which indexes 936 works published in the
Journal of Information Technology and Tourism and in the proceedings of the Enter
conferences.
A search with “Big Data” in the titles, abstracts and keywords returns 14,051 works. The time
distribution is largely uneven and testifies the very recent growth of interest in the subject. A
look at Fig. 1 (works published in the last 15 years) shows an almost exponential growth, with
an acceleration in the last five years.

Fig. 1 Time distribution of Big Data works published in the last 15 years

The situation with BI is different. Here we find 16,496 works (with “Business Intelligence” in
the titles, abstracts and keywords) with a much wider distribution over time and a moderate
growth in the last 15 years (Fig. 2).
 Fig. 1 Time distribution of Business Intelligence works published in the last 15 years

The works related to the wide area of tourism have been identified by restricting the search to
these works having “travel, tourism, tourist, hospitality or leisure” in the titles, abstracts and
keywords. Of these, then, the papers published in tourism and hospitality journals have been
selected (Scopus indexes about 80 journals in the field).
Finally, titles and abstracts have been manually inspected to further pick out the works actually
dealing with BD and BI.

3 Results and Discussion

The total number of BD works in the area of tourism selected as described above is 127. the BI
works are 529. Their time distribution is given in Fig. 3 (for the last five years).
Incredibly, it seems that besides the much hype about the BD issue, not many tourism
researchers have decided to pay some effort in studying these topics, and only a handful of them
have invested time and resources in considering the possibilities of an application of Big Data to
the tourism and hospitality field. The BI field, instead, can count on a relatively higher
throughput, even if still of a very limited size (at least with respect to the total production).

Fig. 3 Time distribution of BD and BI tourism related works for the last five years
What is more interesting is the fact that only 20 of these BD works appear in tourism or
hospitality journals, and therefore more accessible to the tourism academic community. Same
situation is found for the BI papers: only 18 are available in tourism publications. All the others
come from Computer Science (mainly), Transportation, Marketing Management or Geography
publications.
A more detailed reading of the tourism abstracts highlights some other interesting facts.
The first thing to notice, for what concerns Big Data, is that the abstracts and titles contain
rather generic terms, with no or little reference to the specific terminology often used in works
about Big Data (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 A word cloud with the most used terms in the BD papers selected

Some papers present a roughly general discussion about Big Data or about the importance of
using Big Data for improving and extending present research activities (Buhalis & Foerste,
2015; Dolnicar & Ring, 2014; Wang et al., 2015).
Despite the call for a better integration between official statistics and Big Data (see e.g.
Heerschap et al., 2014; Lam & McKercher, 2013), not many attempt to find a solution. Yang et
al. (2014) use web traffic volume data of a destination marketing organisation to predict hotel
demand, showing an improvement in the error reduction more traditional forecasting models,
and Önder et al. (2014) use Flickr geotagged photos to assess the presence of tourists in Austria,
showing that the method provides more reliable outcomes for cities than at a regional level.
Fuchs et al. (2014) show how BD analytics can be beneficial for BI practices in a tourism
destination and propose an architectural solution that combines the different sources of data.
Advanced approaches such as machine learning techniques, artificial intelligence or Bayesian
classification methods are practically ignored, and the most used technique is a simple statistical
textual analysis of pieces collected online from which the authors derive a number of insights.
A notable exception are the papers by Menner et al.(2016) and Schmunk et al. (2014) that
perform sentiment analysis on a large corpus of user generated contents by employing is the
paper by employing these advanced techniques (support vector machines, naïve Bayes
classifiers, latent semantic indexing etc.)
Not many other papers actually use online sources. This is the case of Xiang et al. (2015) that
analyse a large corpus of tourists’ reviews and derive a number of interesting considerations
about hotel guest experience and its association with satisfaction ratings, or Marine-Roig et al.
(2015) that collect a large quantity of user generated comments (travel blogs and online travel
reviews) concerning the area of Barcelona and deduct the perceived image of the city through
these reports. Along this line Park et al. (2015) analyse the tweets generated by cruise travellers
showing their main interests and preferences, thus providing useful suggestions for feasible
marketing strategies, and Mariani et al. (2016) examine the Facebook pages of Italian
destinations revealing how destinations use the social platform and what posts’ characteristics
have the best impact for actively engaging visitors. Finally, d’Amore et al. (2015) present a
hardware and software system for helping in the troublesome collection of data from online
social media platform.
Other types of records are even more sparingly used. Examples are: Kasahara et al. (2015), that
study GPS tracks and a possible method for inferring transportation modes, or Gong et al.
(2016) who use taxi trajectory data (still GPS) for guessing the probability of points of interest
to be visited in a city, and thus deducing possible trip purposes and travel patterns.
It must be noted here that all these works use relatively small quantities of data (in the range of
a few dozen thousand records) compared with what would be (probably) available for the
studies.
Two more works are worth mentioning here, perhaps the only who really base their analysis and
considerations on large volumes of data. One is the study of global mobility of people
conducted by Hawelka et al. (2014) that geotag one year worth of tweets (almost one billion)
and derive the patterns and some characteristics of the movements of international travellers.
The second is the report by RocaSalvatella (2014) that collects one month worth of mobile
phone traffic and credit card transactions data in Madrid and Barcelona (about 700 000 phones
and 170 000 cards), and informs about a number of detailed activities and expenditures of
international visitors to the two cities.
The most recurring terms in the titles and abstracts are summarised in the word cloud of Fig. 4.
Here again most of the words are rather generic and show a relatively traditional approach to the
subject.

Fig. 4 The word cloud with the most used terms in the BI papers selected

The “tourism” BI literature, in fact, mainly focuses on themes such as the organisation of
destination marketing information systems (Ritchie et al., 2002), methods for the analysis of
specific tourists’ segments (Barbieri et al., 2013), examination of competitive intelligence
practices in the hospitality sector (Köseoglu et al., 2016) or frameworks for managing and
analysing data (Fuchs et al., 2013; Höpken et al., 2015).
One interesting factor emerge: among the most recent tourism BI works, four (actually 22%)
are also catalogued in the BD listings (Fuchs et al., 2014; Lam, et al., 2013; Marine-Roig et al.,
2015; Qiao et al., 2014). This is a clear indication of the fact that tourism scholars (at least those
few who treat these topics) have well understood the capability of BD to provide insights that
are useful, or should be used, for enriching the business intelligence practices of destinations
and operators.

4 Concluding Remarks
Although quite popular and strongly pushed by many, the idea that Big Data can be a very
useful source of information for the tourism sector seems to be still a bit ignored by the
researchers in the field, at least when “real” work is concerned. Same situation seems to happen
for what concerns business intelligence studies. It is difficult to understand the reasons for this
situation.
A hint may be that the resources (hardware and software) needed to actually treat huge
quantities of data are not normal available to tourism researchers, but rather sit in computer
science departments, and many of the modern analysis techniques require a good knowledge of
some computer programming language or database management system that are not very
popular among the scholars in the tourism field. For BI, the same could be said, as good
practices call for well and rationally designed, organised and managed information systems.
These issues could be solved by establishing good interdisciplinary collaborations. Moreover,
for the future generations, it is important to start introducing well-tailored educational programs
in the tourism studies curricula.

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