Innovative Applications of Data Science: NLP in Travel and Tourism Industries

Introduction

Travel and tourism (TT) (Darbellay & Stock, 2012; Schuckert et al., 2015) is one of the world’s largest service industries which drive the economics of many nations by their tourist trade. It is an extended sector, comprising many other small sectors within it, including hotel, transport, industry, aviation, hospitality, culture and heritage of the visited nation. All the industries are interdependent to each other and contribute to the growth of travel and tourism sector. In travel and tourism, the contributing each industry or sector has its own challenges and the deviation in one sector will be reflected in another. Among different tourism business and medical tourism plays a vital role in the growth of the visited nation. The purpose of travel may be for heritage and cultural exchange, business, medical emergency, sports, international events, general tourist to see their desired places, etc. Every nation has its own tourist sector that focus on the growth of their heritage locations, pilgrims, and its related industry sectors like hotels. The main objective of the tourist sector of any nation is to promote and develop tourism, to maintain tourist places, to enhance tourist products with respect to the travellers need, to make the tourist or travellers happy in terms of their visit, stay, purchase etc. and through this to increase the employability in nation which intern increases the economy of the nation. The entire nation’s travel and tourism sector has been monitored and taken care by the World Tourism Organization (WTO), which is the United Nations agency that is responsible for promoting a sustainable, responsible, and universally accessible travels. It leads to economic growth through directly and indirectly. Revenue generation by foreign exchange, aviation, lodging, and purchase on the tourist dependent country leads to direct growth of economy, whereas creating business opportunities through tourism thrives for indirect economy growth. Figure 1 shows the number of international tourist arrivals worldwide from 2005 to 2022.

Figure 1.

International tourist arrivals worldwide: 2005 to 2022

Tourism can be divided into 5 major types that include domestic tourism, national tourism, international tourism, inbound tourism, and outbound tourism. The visitors may be same day visitors, international visitors, and domestic visitors. International visitors are the visitors from other countries and are usually overnight visitors i.e., they will stay for more days (3 days to 30 days) usually. Same day visitors are usually from the same nation or businessperson. The tourist sector maintains the data of both international and domestic visitors. Various services to the travellers were provided by tourist sector that includes information on travel destinations through web portal, mobile applications, information about holiday homes, tourist stay, products, registration for important places etc. It always follows up the visitors travel, and the international visitors are always kept in track. This paves the way for more automated language processing and textual data manipulation that involves natural language processing. Through proper integration of NLP and tourist sector we can improve the revenue of the country, more jobs can be created, develop the infrastructure of the country and proper cultural exchange between citizens and foreigners. Moreover, today four more tourism has been evolved that includes food tourism, sustainable tourism, experimental tourism and well tourism. Figure 2 shows the tourist visit to India for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Figure 2.

Tourist visit during the period of 2019, 2020, and 2021

Generally, tourism can impact the economy of a nation by three ways, that includes (1) direct effect, (2) indirect effect, and (3) induced effect. Both the impact and the structure of the tourist sector impacts the economy of nation. As per Seyidov et al. (Seyidov & Adomaitienė, 2016), three elements determine the number of visitors to a country, and they are amenities, accessibility, and attractions towards the desired destination. Tourism can aid the development of low-income country when this sector is properly governed and managed.