Discovering Tourism Topics From Social Media: A Case Study of Japan

Abstract

In this digital age, tourism data on the Internet grows massively. The huge amount of data can be utilized to gain value propositions in smart tourism. Japan, as a major tourism destination worldwide, has a number of organizations that actively promote tourism through various social media sites. Discovering emerging topics of trends in tourism from social media platforms is a challenging task, especially in an unsupervised manner. The presented research aims to discover important tourism topics from social media in Japan using a topic model. The data was obtained from twelve tourism agencies’ Twitter accounts. 21,766 tweets and retweets were collected for the period of four years from 2016 to 2019. A topic model was built using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method. The popular topics obtained reveal most discussed issues posted by tourism agencies in Japan. These topics include, for example, trip guides, culinary experience, and the cherry blossom season. The topic classification from this study provides with insights of Twitter usage promoting tourism across Japan.