Semantic comparison of the emotional values communicated by destinations and tourists on social media

Emotional values play a key role in the creation of destination brands. Nowadays destination management organizations (DMOs) want to make sure that they transmit a set of attractive, distinguishing values and that they are correctly perceived by their visitors. This paper presents a new methodology for the automated, unsupervised semantic analysis of large quantities of tweets sent by the DMOs and the visitors of a destination. As a case study, the results of an analysis of 60,000 tweets related to 10 major European destinations, are presented and the emotional values transmitted from the official Twitter accounts of the destinations compared with those communicated by the tourists in their personal messages. The experiment leads to two important results: the cities examined do not communicate a personalized identity and there are strong discrepancies between the emotional values transmitted by DMOs and those reflected by the comments of visitors. The framework presented in this work constitutes the first semantic methodology for a large-scale automatic analysis of the communication of emotional values by destinations through social media.