UGC Application in Consumer Behavior Studies of Chinese Tourists

Nowadays China is the fastest growing international tourism market, gaining the first position in incoming tourism in Russia. However Chinese market is known to be a difficult one to understand and to establish. For attracting more tourists from this country, their consumer behavior needs to be analyzed. As many researchers investigated the pre visit stage of trips not that many analyzed the behavior during the trip. Nowadays due to development of the Internet technologies and User Generate Content (UGC) there are more opportunities to probe this stage and to fill this research gap. In the present study consumer behavior of Chinese tourists were analyzed by visual and sentiment analysis of UGC in social network Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter). The main findings are that Chinese prefer to post different content to one expected from their travelling motives and sentimentally they are positive about Moscow as tourist destination.