Exploring temporal and spatial structure of tourism market through a big data approach: Whether geographic distance still matters?

The prevalence of tourism social media data offers a new approach to examining the tourism market structure beyond traditional methods. This paper aims to explore the spatiotemporal structure of the tourism market. A total of 75,295 tourist reviews of Sanya, a famous tropical coastal destination in China, were collected from five representative Chinese online travel agencies. Assisted by the innovative techniques of sentiment analysis and regression analysis, this paper examines the relationship between geographic and economic distance and the tourism market structure of Sanya city, represented by the tourists' online attention and reputation. The findings show that the socioeconomic factors of the origins had a greater impact on the online attention of a destination. This study sheds light on how big data can be applied to verify traditional theories in tourism geography.