How to exploit Big Social Data in the Covid-19 pandemic: the case of the Italian tourism industry

From March 2020, restrictive measures have been taken to limit the Covid-19 pandemic, thus impacting and hugely affecting the tourism industry. In this new scenario, tourism destination managers and stakeholders need to look ahead to the future, trying to wisely react to overcome this crisis. This paper aims at demonstrating how a Smart Tourism Destination can tackle the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic using smart and digital technologies such as Big Data and Analytics. In particular, the monitoring of Italian public debates on social media allowed discovering knowledge from unstructured data that provide valuable insights for destination stakeholders and decision-makers.