Reviews reviews on my wall; who’s the best performing of us all?”

In a quality-driven and bottom-up tourism industry, which many strive for, reviews play a vital role. Their candid nature influences operations, strategy, product design and even marketing.

Ignoring reviews is the same as ignoring customers and this is the last thing any business should do.

Reviews are, in their way, the pulse of the tourism industry. They embody the experiences that tourists and locals alike have when in Malta. They range from experiences in restaurants and accommodation to walking tours and museums.

Most of the time, it is a truthful indication of what you would experience when visiting the same place. Reviews are also a source of authenticity and a source of collective emotions. This has a strong implication on marketing.

Investing in expensive and refined advertising for your outlet or experience is useless if your reviews depict a not-so-attractive image of your business.

Whether in a domestic context or overseas, we are all travellers. In most cases, we are more likely to follow a person’s recommendation than a paid advertisement.

Similarly, if you stand in front of a restaurant and quickly skim through the reviews, they will influence your decision on whether you walk in or keep walking.

I also rely more than I should on pictures of food that other travellers upload on such platforms before I order. It is usually a good indicator of what to expect.

Let’s face it: it’s better to find out that a restaurant’s carbonara is cream based on someone else’s picture than from your plate as soon as it is served. Where are these reviews?

In today’s web-based economy, they are distributed on different platforms. The most popular ones are TripAdvisor and Google Maps. However, there are reviews on ticket-selling platforms like GetYourGuide, Viator and Airbnb.

This fragmented distribution of customer reviews is a paradox: it gives travellers a stronger voice to share their feedback but simultaneously makes it challenging for business owners to keep track of these data sources.

We face this problem at Colour My Travel as we strive to deliver impactful excursions and walking tours. In this article, I’m sharing how we deal with this challenge.

The tourism industry needs modern solutions for modern problems. The review fragmentation problem is ultimately a data problem. For this reason, our R&D team focused its effort on studying how modern machine learning techniques can help mitigate this challenge.

The Reviews Analytics (REtics) project, co-financed by the Malta Council for Science and Technology, is developing a suite of tools that use artificial intelligence to make better use of review data.

Modern AI is synonymous with chat applications. The REtics project explores how natural language processing techniques and large language models can be used to efficiently understand what travellers are saying about our experiences.

Review platforms are designed to display reviews as a list, making it challenging to monitor specific trends over time. Furthermore, we all have biases when reading reviews, and some insights might be incorrect.

Moreover, commercial myopia might also hinder us from seeing the bigger picture of a business and make us ignore what travellers truly mean in their reviews.

Based on these challenges, the REtics project is demonstrating how, by shifting the way we interact with customer reviews, more focus can be given to the aspects that can genuinely add value to the experiences.

In an industry where human-to-human interaction is fundamentally important, we are exploring ways in which technology can help us as service providers deliver a better experience to travellers, thus hoping to impact their tourist experience in the Maltese islands positively.

Dylan Seychell

This article is based on the research project REtics (Review Analytics), which is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Technology Development Programme LITE. For more information, refer to https://www.polzify.com 

Dylan Seychell is a lecturer in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and the founder of SeyTravel Ltd.