Tourism, big data, and a crisis of analysis

Highlights

• A crisis of analysis characterizes the use of big data in the tourism industry.

• Big data use supports capital accumulation but also threatens to undermine it.

• The desire for aggregation exists in tension with concerns regarding individuals.

• A form of capitalism insensitive to the concerns of individuals encounters problems.

• A crisis of analysis stems from the objectification of individuals via big data use.

Abstract

Efforts to aggregate data comprehensively have prompted a crisis of analysis. Such a crisis presents itself when big data use within the tourism industry increasingly treats individuals and their subjective practices as mere objects. Heightened recognition of tourism as a series of distinctive and creative human actions is counterbalanced by an exuberance for impersonal mass quantification. A crisis of analysis is identified through a qualitative study of tourism-focused trade journal articles that address big data. This type of crisis reflects the rise of a positivistic, business-driven way of knowing that creates tensions within the tourism industry. The position and power of individuals – tourists and practitioners – is steadily undermined and capital accumulation becomes threatened due to big data use.

Introduction

In a range of industries, including tourism, there has been a shift from conditions of data scarcity to those of superabundance. Changing technology has supported the analysis of enormous volumes of data. With the mass availability of computers possessing increased memory capacity, big data reflect efforts to quantify commerce comprehensively. Big data provide a path to transcendence where business is undertaken with greater efficiency and the problems associated with uncertainty are diminished (Davenport, 2014; Franks, 2012; Walker, 2015). Despite the enthusiasm for big data, the tourism industry has also articulated concerns about the personal autonomy, preferences, and capabilities of individuals within the context of commercially focused algorithmic methods. An impulse to achieve improved accuracy has meant that companies increasingly consider people only within the bounds of the data accumulated and processed.

The data-commerce nexus is responsible for a means of making sense of the world that is designed to be compatible with capital accumulation. This dominant logic, however, is posing problems for the tourism industry. The practices of individuals – addressed within more subjective, human-centred interpretations of tourism (Bargeman & Richards, 2020; De Sousa Bispo, 2016; Lamar et al., 2017) – are not perfectly compatible with the world of computable data. There are concerns about the use of big data that relate to the role of the individual within tourism-based commerce. Profiles of consumers generated by marketers through digital means cannot compensate for the ways in which big data analytics typically disregard certain concerns that have relevance to individuals – and, ultimately, present challenges to the process of capital accumulation.

Big data are used to conceptualize people as an aggregate; quantities, proportions, and averages are one approach to interpreting phenomena. This aggregative thrust is counterbalanced by concerns with respect to big data use. These differing perspectives are expressed within tourism-oriented trade journals. There are contradictory sentiments: the commercial benefits of aggregation, on the one hand, and matters that speak to the concerns of individuals on the other – namely, the protection of privacy, the desire for personalized customer service, and the ability of non-specialists to comprehend big data analytics.

Trade journals in the tourism industry feature articles that document points of view that are emerging as the influence of big data expands within the hotel, casino, and cruise-ship sectors. Many trade journal articles that address big data canonize the use of statistics, reflecting a managerial desire for more comprehensive knowledge. However, hyper-quantification encounters criticism in these sources as well. They do not simply feature the hyperbolic marketing claims of big data advocates. These conflicted responses to big data analytics arguably signal the presence of an emerging crisis of analysis that should be considered alongside a more established knowledge-based crisis: the crisis of representation (Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Mura & Sharif, 2015). A crisis of analysis has arisen as the increasing availability of more comprehensive means of quantifying phenomena has spurred greater anxiety regarding such methods. This crisis stems from the systematic measuring of human activity and the drawbacks of such quantification for commercial ends.

Ever more sophisticated efforts to determine “accurate” patterns create the conditions for concerns that challenge the desirability of the analysis taking place. The inclination to record what can be recorded and measure what can be measured for the purposes of profit – thus aiming to make the totality visible – produces contradictions. A quest for quantified efficiency threatens to undermine the concerns of individuals, both industry practitioners and consumers, within a tourism context. “Big data capitalism” threatens to subvert its own success.

This paper initiates an exploration of data analysis itself as opposed to the information embedded within big data. Big data capitalism is not only content to commoditize human practices but also seeks to steer them through predictive analysis. People become objects from which certain raw materials – their past experiences and individual attributes – are extracted. This objectification process extends to the way in which individual privacy is not always respected, personal preferences can be disregarded, and sophisticated data analysis becomes detached from its connection with people as the methods used become more difficult for non-experts to comprehend. The desire to understand the complexity of human practice within the field of tourism studies coexists with the enthusiasm for transforming human practice into measurable data for the purposes of commercial intervention. Tourism is a domain of tensions and contradictions – between authenticity and inauthenticity (Vidon et al., 2018), between sustainability and environmental degradation (Young et al., 2015), between commodification and resistance to commodification (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2012) – and the circumstances underpinning the crisis of analysis also reflects this notion. This crisis is documented through a qualitative study of tourism-oriented trade publications. Studying human practices and the way in which tourists subjectively experience the world has arguably never been more important to tourism scholars. However, at the same time, trade journal articles indicate that the tourism industry is under the powerful sway of the business-driven tendency to enumerate and measure – and to objectify. Numbers start to take precedence over people.