Nutzergenerierte Reisewarnungen auf Twitter: Eine Explorative Analyse User-Generated Travel Warnings on Twitter: An Explorative Analysis

There is a variety of reasons why travel risk information like travel warnings and guidance of high quality are important. First and foremost, tourists are prone to be under informed about imminent dangers when travelling, as they usually do not have regular access to suitable information outlets and oftentimes do not speak the local language. In case of an emergency, travelers usually do not have sufficient knowledge about local emergency infrastructure preventing them to react appropriately in critical situations. Online applications can provide travel risk information when and where it is necessary and can further help to take appropriate precautions before travelling and prevent dangerous situations in advance by indicating generally risky travel destinations. There are already information systems in place distributing highquality travel risk information. Corporations pay extensive amounts of money to assist their employees during travels and keep them safe from potential threat on the basis of these sources (see e.g. Aon, Drum Cussac). With the advent of social networks, micro-blogging and news platforms like Twitter, information generally propagates more freely than before. Not just the amount and frequency of broadcasted information has increased, but also the diversity of directly available information sources has immensely grown (Kwak, Lee, Park and Moon 2010). Lately, Twitter has been recognized by multiple foreign offices and other official sources as an outlet for travel warnings and guidance. The quality and amount of available travel risk information from these sources on Twitter is substantial and enables for the creation of information systems that bring high-quality travel risk information to the average traveler who do not travel under the safeguarding umbrella of a corporation. The core design artifacts of our research are a travel risk web portal and a mobile application that integrate travel risk related tweets and provides an information system comparable to a corporate travel risk program to consumer markets. The system obtains Twitter feeds from several foreign offices, in order to provide high quality and up to date travel risk information. Tweets, which contain a reference to a country are automatically recognized and presented to the user grouped by country. Twitter has even more potential for providing travel risk information. At a later stage of development, we want to integrate Tweets which were not generated by official sources, but by unaffiliated users of the platform. Despite the fact that it requires more effort to filter for travel risk relevant content and appropriately integrate it into the information system, this kind of information source holds great potential for broadening the information base and providing more detailed first-hand information (Becker, Kay Noyen, Felix Wortmann