User generated content: the use of blogs for tourism organisations and tourism consumers

As the World Wide Web has developed considerable bargaining power has been transferred from suppliers to consumers; there is a real need to improve market intelligence and market research for private and public tourism organisations and facilitate timely consumer decision making. This article explores the development of user generated content and specifically the use of web logs or blogs. Tourism organisations cannot afford to ignore the development of user generated content, peer-to-peer web applications and virtual communities. A recent survey found that consumers trusted more websites with reviews than professional guides and travel agencies and far from being an irrelevance, blogs are often perceived to be more credible and trustworthy than traditional marketing communications. But there is a problem: given the sheer number of possibly relevant travel blogs there is a need to locate, extract and interpret blog content and this has proven so far to be time consuming, exhausting and costly, thus negating the relative value of the information obtained. A way forward may be the use of artificial intelligence and “opinion mining” or a blog visualisation system.