Evaluating the impact of google maps reviews on selecting tourist destinations in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Online reviews have a significant impact on the travelers’ decision on selecting a tourist attraction. There are many sources of online reviews to refer to when planning a journey. The reviews published in the Google Maps play an important role in this regard in the Sri Lankan context. The review rating given for the same tourist attraction can be contradictory in two different review platforms. Therefore, the question of whether travelers believe in the reliability of online reviews needs to be researched. Also, the performance of different types of tourist attractions can be identified by analyzing the review data in Google Maps. There has been only a few research done in Sri Lanka with Google Maps data. We address these issues through a quantitative analysis of data gathered through questionnaire responses. We analyzed and found seven factors that relate with the intention to select a tourist attraction. They are Access Frequency, Willingness to recommend, Attitude towards visiting, Perceived Reliability, Trust on Map Information, Destination perception and Desire to visit. Further we analyzed the data related to tourist attractions scraped out from Google Maps to find out the best performing tourist attraction categories in the Sri Lankan tourism industry.