Social big data for sustainable smart tourism development: a conceptual framework

Recently, social big data are attracting increasingly the attention of tourism scientific community and decision makers, as a source of data that carries incredible insights and knowledge for innovation and value creation of the sector. Although it is widely debated about the opportunities of social big data, their practical utilisation for value creation is still in a very early phase. A suitable understanding of data and its usefulness is the essential keystone toward taking advantage. This paper aims to provide a conceptual framework as basis for guiding tourism operators and destination mangers to properly deal with social big data and create value for a sustainable smart tourism destination by extracting insights and knowledge that would help them to obtain greater intimacy from customers and to adapt to market changes.