• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.53-74
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• 2018

Since South Korea has an economic structure that has a characteristic which market-dependent on overseas, the tourism industry is considered as a very important industry for the national economy, such as improving the country's balance of payments or providing income and employment increases. Accordingly, the necessity of more accurate forecasting on the demand in the tourism industry has been raised to promote its industry. In the related research, economic variables such as exchange rate and income have been used as variables influencing tourism demand. As information technology has been widely used, some researchers have also analyzed the effect of media on tourism demand. It has shown that the media has a considerable influence on traveler's decision making, such as choosing an outbound destination. Furthermore, with the recent availability of online information searches to obtain the latest information and two-way communication in social media, it is possible to obtain up-to-date information on travel more quickly than before. The information in online media such as blogs can naturally create the Word-of-Mouth effect by sharing useful information, which is called eWOM. Like all other service industries, the tourism industry is characterized by difficulty in evaluating its values before it is experienced directly. And furthermore, most of the travelers tend to search for more information in advance from various sources to reduce the perceived risk to the destination, so they can also be influenced by online media such as online news. In this study, we suggested that the number of online media posting, which causes the effects of Word-of-Mouth, may have an effect on the number of outbound travelers. We divided online media into public media and private media according to their characteristics and selected online news as public media and blog as private media, one of the most popular social media in tourist information. Based on the previous studies about the eWOM effects on online news and blog, we analyzed a relationship between the volume of eWOM and the outbound tourism demand through the panel model. To this end, we collected data on the number of national outbound travelers from 2007 to 2015 provided by the Korea Tourism Organization. According to statistics, the highest number of outbound tourism demand in Korea are China, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines, which are selected as a dependent variable in this study. In order to measure the volume of eWOM, we collected online news and blog postings for the same period as the number of outbound travelers in Naver, which is the largest portal site in South Korea. In this study, a panel model was established to analyze the effect of online media on the demand of Korean outbound travelers and to identify that there was a significant difference in the influence of online media by each time and countries. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the impact of the online news and blog eWOM on the number of outbound travelers was significant. We found that the number of online news and blog posting have an influence on the number of outbound travelers, especially the experimental result suggests that both the month that includes the departure date and the three months before the departure were found to have an effect. It is shown that online news and blog are online media that have a significant influence on outbound tourism demand. Next, we found that the increased volume of eWOM in online news has a negative effect on departure, while the increase in a blog has a positive effect. The result with the country-specific models would be the same. This paper shows that online media can be used as a new variable in tourism demand by examining the influence of the eWOM effect of the online media. Also, we found that both social media and news media have an important role in predicting and managing the Korean tourism demand and that the influence of those two media appears different depending on the country.