Big Data Research in the Tourism Industry: Requirements and Challenges

Nowadays, people and things are becoming permanently interconnected. This interaction overloaded the world with an incredible digital data deluge-termed big data-generated from a wide range of data sources. Indeed, big data has invaded the domain of tourism as a source of innovation that serves to better understand tourists' behavior and enhance tourism destination management and marketing. Thus, tourism stakeholders have increasingly leveraging tourism-related big data sources to gather abundant information concerning all tourism industry axes. However, big data has several complexity aspects and brings commensurate challenges that go along with its exploitation. It has specifically changed the way data is acquired and managed, which may influence the nature and the quality of the conducted analyses and the made decisions. Thus, this article investigates the big data acquisition process and thoroughly identifies its challenges and requirements. It also reveals its current state-of-the-art protocols and frameworks.