Using social listening data to bring positivity back into tourism.

Project Description

We used live social listening data to identify hotspots of negative tourism sentiment across New Zealand and used this to power targeted campaigns from the Tourism Industry Aotearoa to prevent this sentiment from snowballing.

KEY Outcomes

Reduced negative commentary towards tourism in New Zealand

Improved overall sentiment towards tourism in New Zealand

The Challenge

While most people feel tourism is good for the country, many New Zealanders also think there are too many tourists. When our borders shut in early 2020, many Kiwis took to the great walks without having to book, headed up North from Auckland to beaches with almost no traffic and saw the sites in Queenstown without battling droves of tourists.

So come May 2022, with the reopening of our country, industry survey data told us that Kiwis were feeling even less favourable towards international tourism than pre-pandemic. We needed to help address this.

The Solution

Data showed us that negative sentiment towards tourism often starts locally in social media and snowballs to national news media. So, we built an automated system to monitor tourism sentiment across social media, check it against a custom sentiment scoring model we built, and automatically trigger our positive campaign as soon as negative sentiment was detected.