Vol.:(0123456789) Quality & Quantity https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-020-01049-8 1 3 Exploiting social data for tourism management: the SMARTCAL project Annarita De Maio 1  · Elisabetta Fersini 1  · Enza Messina 1  · Francesco Santoro 2  · Antonio Violi 3 Accepted: 28 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract In this work we describe a new Smart Tourism System called SMARTCAL, born during the development of a R&D project for supporting the tourism digitalisation, that includes the release of a pilot in Calabria (a region in the South of Italy). The project is a new initia- tive to support tourism and hospitality industry with a series of statistical tools for the deci- sion makers, to provide digital and smart services for the tourists that want to build their itineraries with fexibility and to improve the valorisation of a particular territory from the economical and tourist point of view. Indeed, the system is designed by considering Points and Events of Interest (PEOI) and their relationship with the local transport systems, with the hospitality industries and with the policy makers. Two major tools are described in the following: a proactive tourist tour planner algorithm, proposed to generate optimised itin- eraries based on static and dynamic profling of the users, and a sentiment analysis module that supports decision makers with a scorecard with a set of key indicators. Keywords Recommender system · Smart tourism · Tourist tour planning · Social media * Antonio Violi antonio.violi@unisannio.it Annarita De Maio annarita.demaio@unimib.it Elisabetta Fersini elisabetta.fersini@unimib.it Enza Messina enza.messina@unimib.it Francesco Santoro santoro@itacatech.it 1 Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo), University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy 2 ITACA s.r.l., Rende, CS, Italy 3 Department of Law, Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy