ABSTRACT

Social media are an evolving phenomenon and require constant adaptation from hospitality and tourism marketers, general users and social media researchers. The goal of technology exploitation is not only to customize tourism experiences but also involve, empower and motivate the travellers to participate in the customization of their tourism experiences so that they fit their needs and expectations. Profound understanding of the tourism experience is also paramount to gauging social media impacts. Changes in social media require agility in terms of social media research approaches and methodologies. Social media researchers need to take advantage of the growing amount of data that is available, use the ever bigger array of existing tools for social media monitoring, and most importantly, grapple with the opportunities but also challenges big data approaches offer to tourism researchers. Commercial interests in protecting data make data extraction increasingly problematic.