Tourism Surveying from Social Media: The Validity of User-Generated Content (UGC) for the Characterization of Lodging Rankings

The aim of the thesis is to determine whether online User-Generated Content (UGC) within the lodging industry validates the ranking system of any accommodation property or platform in order to create an international hotel classification system that could categorize any type of accommodation based on different variables

From Blockbuster to Neighbourhood Buster: The Effect of Films on Barcelona

In recent years, cities such as Venice, Dubrovnik, Paris and Barcelona have experienced an exponential increase in visitor numbers leading to episodes of tourismphobia by anti-tourism movements, or even the decline of the destination. Among other solutions, some destinations see film-induced tourism as a possible way of diversifying tourism supply and demand. Through the analysis of the locations of six thematic film routes in Barcelona compared to the same locations on the largest online travel review platform, TripAdvisor, it is concluded that, far from spreading out tourist flows, fiction-induced tourism in Barcelona has concentrated tourism at the main attractions of the city. Only a few exceptions of films with minor audiences lead tourists off the beaten track. Overall, this paper provides a set of recommendations, strategies and challenges for destination managers to help alleviate overtourism and to offer more sustainable tourism away from spots that attract mass tourism.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (grants ID ECO2017-88984-R, TIN2015-71799-C2-2-P, and HAR2016-77734-P), and the support of the Institute of Social Development and Territory INDEST of University of Lleida (call 2018CRINDESTABC). First author also acknowledges the support of the Spanish Education Ministry for the abroad mobility stay “José Castillejo” (Ref. Number CAS19/00362)

Turbo EP-based Equalization: a Filter-Type Implementation

This manuscript has been submitted to Transactions on Communications on September 7, 2017; revised on January 10, 2018 and March 27, 2018; and accepted on April 25, 2018 We propose a novel filter-type equalizer to improve the solution of the linear minimum-mean squared-error (LMMSE) turbo equalizer, with computational complexity constrained to be quadratic in the filter length. When high-order modulations and/or large memory channels are used the optimal BCJR equalizer is unavailable, due to its computational complexity. In this scenario, the filter-type LMMSE turbo equalization exhibits a good performance compared to other approximations. In this paper, we show that this solution can be significantly improved by using expectation propagation (EP) in the estimation of the a posteriori probabilities. First, it yields a more accurate estimation of the extrinsic distribution to be sent to the channel decoder. Second, compared to other solutions based on EP the computational complexity of the proposed solution is constrained to be quadratic in the length of the finite impulse response (FIR). In addition, we review previous EP-based turbo equalization implementations. Instead of considering default uniform priors we exploit the outputs of the decoder. Some simulation results are included to show that this new EP-based filter remarkably outperforms the turbo approach of previous versions of the EP algorithm and also improves the LMMSE solution, with and without turbo equalization