Evaluation of tourists' appreciation through the analysis of social media and web pages: Capraia Island as a test site.

Tourists choose to visit a place in relation to its image communicated through word of mouth, web pages and social networks. Online information for users and at the same time knowledge of tourist behavior provides a great input for successful destination management planning, ensuring an effective communication strategy . The destination image is considered as an attitudinal construct incorporated by feelings, individual's mental representation of knowledge and impression about destination. New technologies today provide access to an enormous amount of data. Internet is more and more a mine of information for people during the travel search process . Scientific community has elaborated and tested tools to identify and quantitatively measuring the destination image. The research focused on the extraction of User Generate Content (UGC) on Social Network and content published on web by tourism operators. The aim is to analyze the image of Capraia Island and the perception of it through tourists' behavior on Instagram. The sample of the research consists of contents retrieved from tourists on Instagram and tourism operators/institutions on web sites. Tourism destination attributes/attractions were identified through a preliminary content analysis. The study performs a content analysis of data collected through an automated dictionary-based approache where dictionaries are defined for destination attributes. Each dictionary is composed of key-words and a computer program developed in R counts the occurrences of key words in each textual file collected. The study analyzed data retrieved from: I) tourism operators Web pages (supply side); II) UGC from Instagram (demand side). The supply side sample is composed by 24 web sites that contain 13.763 words (4.461 unique words). The demand supply sample consists of a total of 9.381 posts retrieved from January 2013 to July 2017. Instagram posts were filtered with an algorithm using a specific time span between the first and the last date of posts, with the aim of analyzing only posts published by tourists . The final demand sample on which the analysis was performed was composed by 4.928 posts with 44.255 words (14.907 unique words). Through a preliminary text analysis, the study focused on the top keywords used to communicate Capraia by tourists and tourism operators. The main keywords have been included in the dictionaries developed for the destination attributes which represent the main Capraia tourism supply: I) main locations of the island; II) hiking trails; III) bays and coves. The results emerged identified how tourist operators promote Capraia island and how tourists communicated their experience on Social Network. Tourist operators mainly focus their communication on the aspects related to the former penal colony, at the same time little perceived/communicated by tourists. Results underline the tourist communication on the aspects related to their experiences, placing them in relation with the heritage of Capraia. This result can reflect the aim of the social network as a tool developed to share experiences and emotions. Results show a strong interaction and communication of the events organized, such as 'Sagra del Totano - Squid feast'. The results provide additional information to official statistical data to policy makers and stakeholders in order to monitor the destinations, take decisions and enhance the role of image in the travel decision process. Acknowledgements The research was partially funded by Tuscany Region in the framework of PROSVINT project.