The present study evaluates the value of tourists’ blogs as a research data source by using them to evaluate the tourist experience and to assess their influence on the decision-making process of prospective tourists. The blogs of 103 tourists visiting South Tyrol, 32 written in English and 71 written in Italian, were analyzed using textual and image content analysis. The text of 246 comments posted to these blogs was analyzed to evaluate the possible influence of bloggers’ narrative on prospective tourists. The results show cultural differences in the way tourists use blogs. Italian blogs appear to have more potential to influence the decision-making process of prospective visitors since their comments often contain recommendations and authors’ declaration of their own future intentions to travel to South Tyrol. They also demonstrate significant potential for revealing market-relevant aspects of tourists’ experience although they do not always convey the ‘experience essence’.

Purpose: This study aims to explore US hotel guests’ privacy concerns with a twofold aim as follows: to investigate the privacy categories, themes and attributes most commonly discussed by guests in their reviews and to examine the influence of cultural proximity on privacy concerns. Design/methodology/approach: This study combined automated text analytics with content analysis. The database consisted of 68,000 hotel reviews written by US guests lodged in different types of hotels in five European cities. Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, Leximancer and SPSS software were used for data analysis. Automated text analytics and a validated privacy dictionary were used to investigate the reviews by exploring the categories, themes and attributes of privacy concerns. Content analysis was used to analyze the narratives and select representative snippets. Findings: The findings revealed various categories, themes and concepts related to privacy concerns. The two most commonly discussed categories were privacy restriction and outcome state. The main themes discussed in association with privacy were “room,” “hotel,” “breakfast” and several concepts within each of these themes were identified. Furthermore, US guests showed the lowest levels of privacy concerns when staying at American hotel chains as opposed to non-American chains or independent hotels, highlighting the role of cultural proximity in privacy concerns. Practical implications: Hotel managers can benefit from the results by improving their understanding of hotel and service attributes mostly associated with privacy concerns. Specific suggestions are provided to hoteliers on how to increase guests’ privacy and on how to manage issues related to cultural distance with guests. Originality/value: This study contributes to the hospitality literature by investigating a neglected issue: on-site hotel guests’ privacy concerns. Using an unobtrusive method of data collection and text analytics, this study offers valuable insights into the categories of privacy, the most recurrent themes in hotel guests’ reviews and the potential relationship between cultural proximity and privacy concerns.

Travel restrictions and social distancing imposed to curb the spread of the new coronavirus have been strongly hitting tourism since March 2020. Tourism forecasting literature addressed the effects of shocks in contexts characterized by a predictable route to recovery. COVID-19 is without precedents. In this article, monthly overnight stays for the period January 2010 to December 2020 are used to estimate the impact of the pandemic in Lombardy, Italy’s most affected region. A model-based approach is implemented, and the number of overnight stays up to December 2023 is forecasted. Four models are compared. Estimation results from an augmented SARIMA model suggest that, provided a new lockdown is averted, the domestic segment will recover in a relatively short period of time, whereas international tourism might need an external intervention to speed up its recovery process.