Raidah Hanifah, Nick Malleson, Victoria Houlden, Alexis Comber
Tourism plays a vital role in economic development, but fluctuations in demand, particularly during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, highlight the limitations of traditional data sources for timely and detailed monitoring. This study investigates the potential of social media data (Twitter now X) as a complementary data source for estimating domestic and international tourist arrivals. A three-step pipeline was developed to identify tourists from other non-tourist social media users: (1) users were classified using a Large Language Model (LLM) to exclude non-individual accounts; (2) home location was inferred through geocoding of self-reported textual information; and (3) tourists were classified based on the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) criteria of spatial origin, trip duration, and travel purpose. Social media derived estimates of tourist arrivals in Bali between 2019 and 2021 were compared with official statistics and showed strong correlations, with coefficients of 0.999 for international tourist arrivals and 0.896 for domestic arrivals. As well as monthly counts, the approach provided fine-grained insights into tourist behaviour, including inferred home origins, destination hotspots, and daily and hourly arrival patterns–dimensions that are typically absent from conventional datasets. While the consistency of social media data declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings demonstrate that social media can be used to generate timely, flexible, and spatially detailed observations that complement official statistics. A number of discussion points and areas of further work are identified to refine classification methods, to enhance scalability and the applicability of the approach in diverse contexts. © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom; Informatics Department, Institut Teknologi Sumatera, South Lampung, Indonesia