Addressing Researchers' Quest for Hospitality Data: Mechanism for Collecting Data from Web Resources

Abstract

Data collection is always a challenge. Researchers in the hospitality and tourism industry can benefit from the extensive amount of industry related data that are publicly available on the Internet. The issue holding most researchers back is how to efficiently collect such data. This article provides a solution: automated data collection using Web spiders. The coding logic needed to implement a custom Web spider is outlined. Also addressed are the ethical and operational issues associated with Web spiders.