The influence of foreigners’ buzzing on TripAdvisor ranking of restaurants in Venice: implications for the sustainability of over-touristed heritage cities

Abstract

Local and global coexist in any tourist destination, and the challenge of tourism sustainability is what remains in the balance between these two dimensions. Social and consumer-generated media are changing how local and global are coming together in the local system. These media's effects are even more important in overtouristed places, where a significant imbalance between local and tourist development already exists. In this paper, the effects from foreigners' reviews in crowd-based ranking systems in overtouristed cities are investigated. Based on a case study of TripAdvisor's restaurant rankings in Venice, our findings suggest that foreigners' reviews systematically rate tourist experiences' quality higher than non-foreigners' reviews, and that their attitude significantly affects the ranking of these experiences. This discloses these systems' limited reliability in overtouristed cities when it comes to rank quality, as well as the potential risks deriving from their large and uncontrolled adoption. The study concludes that a governance system is needed that is more respectful and inclusive of these places' specific requirements.

Data mining to reposition a religious tourist destination in COVID-19

“…So, like in Venice, an overtourism problem seems to make the destination less attractive due to the excessive number of visitors. This overtourism has led to a touristification of the city (Ganzaroli et al , 2021), as some comments of the visitors have revealed (e.g. many allusions to souvenirs and postcards or daily guided excursions).…”

“…For example, the use of technologies to improve connectivity, information systems and sensorization to solve overcrowding and to “better understand the movements of the tourists while at the destination, the relations they have with other tourists and residents and the places they visit” (Bulchand-Gidumal, 2022). The improvement of smart technologies will also contribute to solving the overtourism problem (Ganzaroli et al , 2021), and increase visitors’ satisfaction and positive eWOM.…”

“…The image of a tourist destination depends deeply on the user-generated content encouraged by tourists using new technologies (Mariné-Roig and Clavé, 2015; Ganzaroli et al , 2021). As Mariné-Roig and Clavé (2015) have underlined, social media provides a huge quantity of information that allows you to form a first impression of a destination.…”

Destination Resilience and Innovation for Advanced Sustainable Tourism Management: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The Journal of Sustainable Tourism (H-index: 103) promotes the understanding of sustainability and its relationship with the tourism industry by stimulating The third scientific production period (2015-2021) counts 213 contributions. The themes of innovation and sustainability, resilience, e.g., [51,[103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110] and its related topics, such as disaster and crisis recovery, i.e., [104][105][106][107][108]; climate change, i.e., [111][112][113][114]; and overtourism, i.e., [115][116][117], start to emerge. Other papers stress the attention on smart destinations.…”

Intellectual capital and the coronavirus crisis: taking a closer look at restaurants’ strategies

“…prominent user-generated content platform for restaurants evaluation (Ganzaroli et al, 2020); (ii) it is considered the premier data source for empirical evidence (Xiang et al, 2017); and (iii) it is intensively used in academic research (Ganzaroli et al, 2020;Oktadiana et al, 2020;Pezenka & Weismayer, 2020;Ruiz-Mafe et al, 2020). Besides, as Ganzaroli et al (2017) point out, it provides an average quality score that comprises the main factors that affect restaurants' success on the market, namely: food, service, value for the money, and atmosphere.…”