SMGI in tourism planning: the role of customers’ preferences in spatial decision support.

The dissertation deals with the role of social media platform is playing as an information resource in tourism both for customers (i.e. the tourists), who gather trustworthy information supporting the choice of destinations and services from peers, and for businesses, which can use the same information for improving their marketing strategies. The use of social media data can also offer new opportunities for decision‐support in tourism planning. With improved understanding of the motivations of tourists and tailoring tourism service supply, decision making can be facilitated by emphasizing the strengths of tourist destinations for past and potential visitors. However, this kind of information about tourists’ perceptions and opinions is not always properly analysed by planners. Understanding the user satisfaction, which depends on factors related to both the location and the services that the local industry proposes, may offer valuable information in tourism planning at regional and local level. In the light of the above premises, the goal of this study is to propose an integrated approach to investigate the relationships between tourists’ satisfaction, destination resources and tourism industry for supporting design and decision‐making in regional tourism planning. The methodology implemented in the thesis includes data collection from Booking and TripAdvisor.com and their integration with authoritative territorial data. Spatial and statistical analysis techniques are applied in order to assess tourists’ perceptions on success factors, which may be used as planning support tools. Four cases study demonstrates the value of social media‐related data integrated by authoritative information in tourism planning. Finally, the dissertation proposes a critical discussion on the effectiveness of using the implemented integrated approach in order to address other planning issues. The discussion underlines the potential of the proposed approach in order to address other planning questions as well.