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Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) for Destination Promotion by Tourists

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Current Trends in Web Engineering (ICWE 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11153))

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Abstract

As the social media has redefined how people communicate and contact their networks, the importance once held by interpersonal influence and word-of-mouth has shifted toward electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). The influence of eWOM is prominent in the tourism industry. In such a context, this study aims to examine the viability of using tourists as ambassadors for promoting tourism in Sri Lanka using social media as the communication medium. For this study, we have created a semantic representation of an Instagram post and analyzed 82,771 public Instagram posts about Sri Lanka from 28,875 distinct users. The findings revealed that as a significant number of tourists use social media to share their experiences in Sri Lanka, the use of social media for destination promotion is a viable and timely choice. Although the Sri Lankan cuisine can be an enticing factor which has the capacity to open new tourism themes, our study unveiled that the promotion of the Sri Lankan cuisine is scarce.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.instagram.com/developer/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.oneniceapp.com.

  3. 3.

    http://www.meipai.com/en.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Madrid, Spain

    Prasad N. Samarakoon

  2. Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Nandana Mihindukulasooriya

Authors
  1. Prasad N. Samarakoon
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  2. Nandana Mihindukulasooriya
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nandana Mihindukulasooriya .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

    Cesare Pautasso

  2. Quercus Software Engineering Group, Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Fernando Sánchez-Figueroa

  3. Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Kari Systä

  4. Escuela Politécnica, Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Juan Manuel Murillo Rodríguez

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Samarakoon, P.N., Mihindukulasooriya, N. (2018). Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) for Destination Promotion by Tourists. In: Pautasso, C., Sánchez-Figueroa, F., Systä, K., Murillo Rodríguez, J. (eds) Current Trends in Web Engineering. ICWE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11153. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03056-8_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03056-8_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03055-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03056-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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