Where do Americans want to travel this summer? The answer lies in our 5 step analysis from social media!

Are you still thinking about the vacation that you couldn't attend last summer? Or were you among the lucky few who anticipated the subsequent waves of the Covid-19 and didn't make any plans? In any case, the critical part here is that you shouldn’t be afraid of making plans for this summer as we enter the new normal in the world of travel, as long as you follow the safety guidelines and protocols during your journey.

Moreover, of course, it's easy to daydream about that vacation in Cinque Terre. Or are you the adventurous type and prefer Nazaré? This abundance of options and the resulting analysis-paralysis is probably one of the main reasons why your summer plans have still not materialized. Also, if you’re anything like me and order food at restaurants by looking at what others are eating, it might be good to consider where other people are heading over this summer.

Since finding such recommendations requires keeping track of a massive amount of information to conduct a thorough analysis, we want you to let us take care of that. With Dcipher Analytics, we have the power of cutting-edge AI-based technology that can provide recommendations in minutes by analyzing a wide range of social media data. Why social media? Because seasonal trends change every year, and since people use social media to share what they think, plan, or anticipate doing, it is an excellent resource to find such recommendations for your next vacation destination.

However, it is nearly impossible to collect all the social media posts related to vacation plans and define which areas are in demand without spending a generous amount of time. It also requires highly complicated analytical tools or coding operations to get valuable insights from the collected data. And so, Dcipher Analytics offers you a great solution that can turn vast amounts of text data into valuable insights. Thanks to its AI-based technology, by using Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is possible to analyze this massive amount of data to information in just a few minutes. Most importantly, It doesn’t require any knowledge about complex analytical tools or programming knowledge.

In today's post, we will walk you through each step and show how you can analyze the destinations of choice for Americans by importing social media posts on Dcipher Analytics. All this in just five simple steps! We hope these findings can help you choose your next trip’s destination. So let’s get started!

Step 1: Import the data from social media


At the first step, once we get into the platform, we simply click Create a new project to start the process. Then four options are shown that offer some helpful structured paths. We then continue with a New blank project.

After we’ve named the project and created it, we choose to Import data from social media since the resource we want to collect the data from is social media. Then, it allows us to select the social media platforms from which we can take the data. Then we write the necessary words related to travel in the following step, such as vacation, wanderlust, and bucket list. Lastly, we choose the language and the country relevant to our research.

Based on the source of the required data, we complete the importing process. Now you can also view the raw data in the Table View and easily navigate around it.

Step 2: Pre-processing of the data


Here, we pre-process the data from the Wizards feature for cleaning the unstructured and complex data to decrease the noise in the data to get more accurate results.

We then choose the necessary data (content.segments.value) and remove the outliers & duplicates, filter the English content and clean the text from URLs & XML tags. Lastly, we split the data into paragraphs and click to continue to finalize the process.

If you want to learn more about pre-processing steps, you can read text cleaning & pre-processing at the help center.

Step 3: Tokenize and Tag


After cleaning the text data, the following step is Tokenize & Tag. We use this process for splitting the text into meaningful units in the form of words, phrases, and named entities tagged by parts-of-speech.

To apply it, we choose the data set that we want to use the operation on and click the Add Operation button above. After finding the operation, we define the preprocessing preferences and tagging options. Part-of-speech tagging helps reduce noise by keeping only the most relevant parts of speech, such as nouns. As a result of this process, our data is divided into tokens and is now tagged accordingly.

You can also learn more about tokenization and tag operations here.

Step 4: Filter the relevant tags


At this step, before continuing to process, we can see the tokens by dragging and dropping the dataset to Table View. It shows tokens as id, value, and tag in different columns.

In this analysis, since we are trying to understand which destinations are of interest, we filter the relevant tags, such as “Location” and “Geo-Political Entity.” Then, at the end of the video, you can see that only the appropriate values are visible in the Table View according to the filtered tags.

Step 5: Show the findings on Foam Chart


Lastly, since we want to show the extracted data with an understandable representation, we will utilize Dcipher Analytics’s workbenches, including various chart types, to visualize the findings. For this analysis, we’ve used a Foam Chart to show which places are preferred the most for travel destinations this summer.

According to the Foam Chart, we can see that most Americans plan to stay in the US and visit nearby cities and states like:

However, some Americans still prefer to go abroad and visit countries like:

There you go! As promised, we did all this in 5 simple steps that you can also try yourself to see where residents of other countries would like to go this summer. Let us know what will be your next destination for this summer from the Foam Chart above! To not miss out on our future blogs, make sure to follow us on our LinkedIn page as well.

If you also want to extract valuable insights easily from the unstructured text data:

Get started!

To access our text analytics toolbox and try out analyzing free-form text responses in Dcipher Analytics, sign up for a free trial.

Book a demo