What policymakers can learn from online reviews
There’s a goldmine of data in online reviews — here’s how policymakers can put it to use
We live in a reputation economy where we constantly swipe, scroll and rate our cab drivers and experiences in different restaurants and hotels. Due to the infinite powers vested upon us by social media, various apps and online platforms, we, the users, utter the rise and fall of companies.
Keeping up with consumer needs is difficult. Nowadays — or at least before COVID-19 put the majority of the world in some form of lockdown — people tend to spend money on attending art exhibits, doing outdoor activities, learning new skills, and going to places that offer experiences they’ve never had before. This is when real-time, trusted, online recommendations by peers come in handy, while also helping to save time and maximise our experience.
Every month, 456 million people visit TripAdvisor and more than 200 new stories are posted on the platform every minute, providing an up-to-date portrait of the world. Booking.com has around 192 million reviews from verified guests (as of April 2020). Using these crowdsourced insights, hotels, restaurants and other businesses maintain their reputation and create novel travel experiences.
However, this has its drawback. The data out there is so immense, it might take hours (or days) to scroll through all the reviews to get the bigger picture. The data is not analysed and visualised into easily digestible information that could save time.
At Armenia’s SDG Innovation Lab, we thought if making informed decisions has become a regular part of our digital lives, can we use the same ample reservoir of unexplored data — online reviews — to inform public policy and advance data-driven governance in the tourism sector.
Why tourism?
Tourism is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors that create jobs around the world. It is responsible for 10% of the global GDP.
The tourism sector is recognised as playing a critical role in reducing unemployment rates, promoting entrepreneurship and eliminating societal problems, this way accelerating the implementation of the 2030 Agenda of the SDGs.
At 16%, tourism is one of the major contributors to the GDP in Armenia as well. Despite its long history, Armenia is a relatively new player in global tourism. The Economist’s Country of the year 2018, Armenia, has a great potential to become an appealing spot on the global map of weekend gateways and must-visit places for gastrotourism and ecotourism in the region. According to UNWTO World Tourism Barometer, Armenia is the 12th fastest growing destination in the tourism industry.
But new waves of tourists pose novel challenges for sustainable tourism development. Addressing the challenges of tourism, including overtourism, requires integrated policies that fully consider tourism’s cross-cutting impacts on the SDGs. To manage industry vulnerabilities, develop destination marketing and invest in new markets and services, the policymakers need up-to-date information, which is based on real experiences and needs of tourists.
An app to fit your needs
Last year, our team at the SDG Lab began sifting through thousands of reviews on different hospitality-related platforms. For months, our team of data scientists, together with programmers, tourism agencies and businesses, tourism experts, and the Tourism Committee of RA developed a new tool from scratch, and in March 2019, we launched the demo version of Travelinsights.ai.
This AI-based online tool collects, analyses and categorises tourist sentiments about Armenia from popular travel websites and reveals real travel preferences and on-the-ground issues in real-time through visualisation.
If users need customised data for a report, they can simply download that data in different formats
With one scroll, policymakers or businesses can explore insights from all over the world about different regions and locations of Armenia. They can customise data to their interests by choosing a specific region, location, time, category and aspect. Features include comparing two regions by using different filters, as well as the review and price heat-maps. If users need customised data for a report, they can simply download that data in different formats.
The tool has already analysed more than 165,000 reviews from TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Facebook.com to generate more than 476,000 insights. Based on the feedback from our users, we have added Russian reviews, the origin of the countries of the reviewers, insights for a specific location, and many other functionalities. This way, policymakers can identify the needs of the tourists and provide policy recommendations for community-based sustainable tourism development in sites tourists are more interested in, on experiences they are satisfied with or expect more diversification or improvement.
So, what have we learned?
Always ask the user
At the SDG Lab we use design thinking to address complex problems and create solutions with the user in mind. Knowing the real needs of the user seems to be self-evident, but often it is unintentionally omitted in policymaking.
For us, design thinking is more than merely methodology or framework, it is a way of thinking. We engaged our primary users — policymakers and businesses — in every step of the development of the tool. Together with them we identified their real needs and motivations, brainstormed over a user journey, tested the features of the prototype, and iterated a lot before we could launch the final product.
Build your in-house capacity
This might sound logical, but when we just started working on the project back in 2018, we didn’t have the big team we have now. We had to outsource our technical team (data scientists and programmers) for our data-related projects. For any type of product development, it is important to have a team of diverse experts: social researchers, policy advisers who are familiar with the peculiarities of the sector, as well as data scientists, programmers, designers and many more.
It is one thing to gather those people and another to have them work in unison towards the end goal. This is where a project/product manager comes in and takes responsibility for the teamwork and final product development. You can either hire such a person or, if you are an agile management practitioner like us, you can assign one of the team members who can keep track of the bigger picture in the best sense of agile management.
Prepare to fail and become resilient to change
To develop our algorithms that can label data, do sentiment analysis, and most importantly classification of categories for this specific product, we had to endure several failed attempts, manual labeling by team members and sleepless nights. Be ready to experiment and prepare to fail a lot during this process.
What’s next?
Version 2.0 of the app became publicly available in March 2020.
The positive and negative insights gained from reviews will help the government to shape marketing strategy based on evidence, improve services that tourists love the most, and eliminate those challenges that prevent people from having a perfect vacation.
The perfect holiday formula and, ultimately, tourism development also depend on businesses and their services. With the incoming tourism boom, the market needs to re-orient itself towards catering to tourists’ needs. Travelinsights.ai is a perfect tool to inform businesses on how to best improve their services and environment to better meet the needs and expectations of the tourists. This will eventually lead to fiscal growth and development of the country, resulting in the rise of the GDP in Armenia.
As the next step, we plan on nudging businesses to encourage tourists to write reviews on any experience they get while staying in the country. — Ruzanna Baldryan
(Picture Credit: Unsplash)
The tool is created with financial support from the Russian Federation, in co-operation with UNDP in Armenia and the Tourism Committee of the Republic of Armenia. More tools and projects with a mission to help Armenia leapfrog in development will be released soon.
Armenia National SDG Innovation Lab is the joint initiative of the Government of Armenia and the UN, backed by the UNDP. It is a public policy lab that mines data and uses artificial intelligence to advance evidence-based policymaking.
This opinion was first published on Apolitical.co
