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Venice restaurant with a viewCourtesy TripAdvisor.com
Claudia Stellini

The influence of foreigners’ buzzing on TripAdvisor ranking of restaurants in Venice: implications for the sustainability of over-touristed heritage cities

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By Andrea Ganzaroli, Ivan De Noni and Michelle Bonera

How much restaurants’ reputation in crowdsourcing systems is influenced by foreign tourists in overtouristed cities? Click to learn more about the reliability of rating systems based on crowdsourcing in overtouristed cities.

Are rating systems based on crowdsourcing capable to discriminate the quality of restaurants in overtouristed cities? When it is about lunchtime or dinnertime in a foreign tourist city, we promptly take our phone out of the pocket and start to type on the screen looking for a good restaurant where to enjoy the quality of local food. We start to compare ratings and reviews provided by alternative apps and then, finally, we make our decision. However, who did decide the reputation of your restaurant? To what extent the evaluation of other foreigners has influenced the reputation of your restaurant?

The answers to those questions are particularly relevant in the case of overtouristed cities, in which a large share of customers’ reviews is from foreign people who may lack the know-how to evaluate the quality of local food. Furthermore, those people may be positively influenced by the atmosphere, their being on vacation, or by the judges of the others (herd behavior). Therefore, they may tend to overrate the quality of restaurants and that of the food served. This may lead to systematic distortion in the crowding system ranking the quality of restaurants and, more in general, the cultural goods offered in overtouristed cities. The consequences of those systematic distortions may be crowding out quality from overtouristed cities. A phenomenon that we have learned to call touristification.

To verify the likelihood of such an occurrence, Ganzaroli, De Noni, and Bonera have run an experiment based on the data collected from TripAdvisor on 575 restaurants in Venice. Their findings confirm that foreigners systematically overrate the quality of restaurants in Venice compare to Italians. Furthermore, this attitude significantly affects restaurants’ reputation and ranking on TripAdvisor. However, Italian does not mean Venetian, but, likely, he or she may know better about the quality of Venetian food.

If you want to learn more about this research, you may click here and download the full paper published in Current Issue in Tourism.

Venice commerce affected by Covid
Claudia Stellini

Venice commerce before and after COVID

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By Lucas Fernandes, Nathan Morin, Taylor Ostrum, Kavim Bhatnagar from Worcester Polytechnic Institute

This project’s mission is to provide a web-application tool that visualizes and analyzes trends in Venetian Commerce over time by organizing archival data provided by the Venice Project Center (VPC). The WPI students have deployed a platform that future collaborators will be able to iterate on to help assess Venice’s economy.

These are their main objectives:

  1. Consolidate data that was previously collected on Venetian stores
  2. Design and test a comprehensive and flexible web-application
  3. Analyze archival WPI data on Venetian commerce
  4. Plan for the future of the web application

Shop data provides an invaluable look into the bigger picture of a city’s economic status. Being the main contributors to the production of goods and services in an economy, shops can act as an economic indicator. In the case of Venice, Italy, tourism plays a big role in its economy as approximately 25% of shops cater toward tourists alone. This socially excludes local Venetians and causes a divide between them and visitors. However, for the first time in history, tourists are no longer able to visit the city due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of this, Venetian commerce has been greatly affected.

In order to see how Venice’s economy has been affected, it is imperative to understand and visualize its commerce history, which has been quantified for over 15 years by the VPC. Starting in 2004, eight WPI teams have collected shop data from various sestieri all over Venice, taking note of attributes such as shop names, addresses, and geographical location.

For this project, a team of VPC students worked with SMARTDEST and SerenDPT. The latter is a Venetian start-up organization in charge of the Venice case study of the SMARTDEST project. With their help, a web application was built from the ground up. This app permits to visualize the history of Venetian commerce.

In order to do this, the team found, consolidated, and cleaned eight datasets on shops. This process took all previously recorded shop records, 11,312 to be exact, and unified them into one collective dataset, which now houses all shop data ever collected by the VPC. This work was done remotely, over the course of seven weeks, with the help of their advisors, Professors Fabio Carrera and Jennifer deWinter. The dataset houses three subsets of data, “Venice Shops”, “Store Locations”, and “Venice Shops Images”. Lastly, the students also found and consolidated any and all photos of shops and stored them in our “Venice Shops Images” dataset. Once cleaned, this data was then visualized on the web application. It allows users to filter shop data by the year the data was collected, the type of shop, as well as filter shops by their target audience.

Want to know more about our project? Check our website and learn about Venetian shops on a real-time basis!

Curated by Giulia Speri

People qu
Andrea Ganzaroli

Past and Future of Venice’s Tourism Industry

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Authors: Madison Di Vico, Martin McCormack, Lucas Micheels, Lauren Revene, Joe Sorrenti

The picturesque city of Venice is a destination well-known for its architectural and cultural allure. This unique lifestyle attracted roughly 26 to 30 million tourists annually prior to COVID-19. For decades, the number of tourist beds available in Italy consistently increased. This roughly 16% annual climb did not come without consequences. From 2000 to 2020, the resident population dropped from 76,007 to 51,550. As of 2019, there were more tourist beds available than residents. As a result, UNESCO gave Venice a deadline of 2021 to mitigate the environmental effects of tourism on the city or risk officially adding it to the endangered list.

However, these trends rapidly changed when COVID19 spread across the world. In February of 2020 Venice was placed under lockdown to combat the influx of victims that plagued the nation. As a means to remedy the damage to tourism and local businesses, the SmartDest Project had chosen to sponsor a proposal from SerenDPT that focuses on solutions to issues of dependency and deterioration of Venetian. The goal was to analyze tourism and the effects that it had on the economy, environment and culture in Venice as well as to create policy to usher in sustainable tourism. In doing this a team of VPC students form the Worcester Polytechnic institute worked to supply SerenDPT with pre-COVID socioeconomic trends regarding tourism; to aid in the development of a tool to automatically collect real-time tourism data; and engage with stakeholders in tourism and plan an event for stakeholders to meet and discuss sustainable tourism.

The individual stakeholders all have problems specific to their discipline and with varying severity. In order to help these stakeholders, develop a more sustainable tourist experience in Venice, the first passage was to analyze pre-COVID socioeconomic data. The research proved the fragility of the tourism industry, making it evident that it needed to be monitored. This led the team to renovate and repurpose the Venice Dashboard. Designing the new dashboard moved it from a tourist focused program to a researcher and policy maker oriented one. The new design presents data found from websites and API’s (application programming interface) which will be displayed in real time. The data will be displayed in various forms such as interactive maps, bar and line graphs and charts. In doing this the functionality of the website increases, as researchers will have a one stop spot for all socio-economic tourist data.

As per the SmartDest grant, they organized multiple stakeholder events to be conducted in Venice with the goal of discussing tourist related issues to help bring officials and administrators to make policy. The events have been organized into 5 groups each of which will have members from associations discussing issues in their industry: hospitality, tourism, transportation, housing and commerce association. We hope that this work will be beneficial to the grants goal of upgrading pan-European policy, influencing the issues of mobilization and exclusion brought on by tourism.

 

Want to know more about our project? Check our website and learn about tourism in Venice on a real-time basis!

 

Curated by Giulia Speri

SmartDest

Venice Tourism May Never Be the Same. It Could Be Better.

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Can the pandemic be an opportunity to rethink tourism? This article published in “The New York Times” discusses the Venetian case. In particular, it reflects on how the crisis can be an opportunity to make future travel to and in cities more sustainable and to develop an economy that does not rotate entirely around tourism.

Go to the article: link