Application of rough set and netnography in tourism marketing analysis

Abstract

Purpose

Social media has given customers more power over sharing their knowledge, opinions and experiences with each other. Tourists as customers of destinations are also using text ads on social media and websites to share their experiences. The purpose of this study is to find out the factors which have affect on the decisions of tourists towards the most popular destinations in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz of Iran.

Design/methodology/approach

Netnography methodology has been applied to 2,852 comments showing travelers’ experiences through TripAdvisor.com. As a result, ten major factors have been discovered. According to these factors, a questionnaire has been designed and distributed among 449 tourists. In the second step, the collected data are used by rough set theory to discover the rules of destination recommendation based on the factors discovered before. Finally, eight main rules are determined to further analysis.

Findings

The findings confirm that beauty, cultural attractions, safety, welfare, costs and dealing with passengers are more important than other observed dimensions.

Originality/value

In this study, first the factors affecting consumer behavior in the tourism industry have been investigated. Based on this, the comments of tourists who have traveled to one of the cities Shiraz, Isfahan or Teheran and shared their experiences on TripAdvisor.com are studied. Further, the rules are discovered based on the rough set theory, and owing to the large number of objects (449 customer), the Rosetta software has been used.

Citation

Sajjadian, F., Sheikh, R., Souri, M.E. and Sana, S.S. (2018), "Application of rough set and netnography in tourism marketing analysis", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 1025-1036. https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-02-2018-0029