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Social media are acknowledged as an important information source that influences tourists’ travel choices. However, qualitative studies that take an inductive approach to identify the roles of social media by investigating how social media affect travel choices are limited. By interviewing 21 tourists who had recently taken trips, this article aimed to identify the roles that social media played in the tourists’ choices of six travel components (destination, transportation, accommodation, food and dining activities, attractions, as well as shopping and leisure activities). Four roles have been identified: Need Generator, Supporter, Guider and Approver. Theoretical and practical implications along with future research suggestions are discussed.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic and quantitative review of published papers on smart tourism. More specifically, the paper aims to identify the smart tourism research life cycle, collaboration trends, main social structure, disciplinary approaches and foundations, research topics and methodological approaches. Design/methodology/approach Systematic quantitative review techniques were used to review smart tourism literature. Frequency analysis, network analysis, text mining techniques were performed on data obtained from 96 papers collected from three databases as follows: Web of Science, Scopus and EBSCOhost. Findings The smart tourism research life cycle has two turning points with an exponential increase: 2015 and 2017. The latter is mainly associated with the internationalization of collaboration. Social structure of smart tourism research was revealed. Many of the ideas and research trends are affected by one research cluster. Destination related articles are dominant in smart tourism research. Internet of things and tourist experience are less researched areas. Only a quarter of the articles was published in tourism and hospitality journals. In particular, there is a big gap in published papers in hospitality journals. An important gap from methodological aspect is limited number of qualitative studies with human subjects. The geographical limitation is high concentration of smart tourism studies in Korea. Research limitations/implications This study collected and analyzed only full papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Future research may consider including book chapters and/or conference proceedings. This study was mainly based on quantitative review techniques. Qualitative or mixed review techniques may be conducted. Originality/value This study is the first literature review on an increasingly popular topic of smart tourism.

Purpose This study aims to conduct a systematic review and critically analyze the sentiment analysis literature in hospitality and tourism from methodological (data sets and analyzes) and thematic (topics, theories, key constructs and their relationships) perspectives. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative thematic review and quantitative systematic review were performed on 70 papers obtained from hospitality and tourism categories of two databases, namely, Web of Science and Scopus. Findings A total of 5 topics and 27 sub-topics were identified and the major theme is market intelligence. Sentiment variables were investigated not only as independent but also as dependent variables. The customer rating is the most investigated dependent variable, whereas moderators and mediators were rarely tested. Most reviewed studies did not use theory. The findings from the methodological review show that analysis of big data was rare. Moreover, testing the performance of sentiment analyzes was uncommon, and only one paper tested the performance of aspect/feature extraction. Research limitations/implications This study extends prior review studies by providing a comprehensive view of how knowledge and methodologies of sentiment analysis have developed. The identified themes and key constructs serve as a solid base for future knowledge advancement. Future research directions on sentiment analysis are also provided. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first comprehensive methodological and thematic review of sentiment analysis in hospitality and tourism. Based on the identified findings, the authors propose several directions for future research.