Understanding the Role of Social Media in Backpacker Tourism

The Web 2.0 revolution has affected many areas of society and tourism is not exception to that. Travel 2.0 replaced the first, booking-oriented wave with a crowdsourced, fully interactive one that aids travel planners in making decisions via user-generated content (UGC). In this work, we study how social media are shaping backpackers' experiences by employing sentiment analysis on their blogs. Into the bargain, there are two main research objectives which consist on providing insights into the contemporary backpackers' attitudes and examining the potential implications of their UGC to assist travel-related marketing strategies along with product and service improvement. Such information is found in word-based blog entries and is extracted and analyzed through a combination of methods, specifically sentiment analysis and digital ethnography.