Using Twitter as a Source for Travel Warnings: Understanding the Role of Information Source and Target Audience

Business travelers are oftentimes equipped with technology informing them about local dangers. As these corporate travel risk applications increase personal safety during travels, they are also expensive and hardly available to the average traveler. Online platform Twitter, known for extensive contribution by nonaffiliated users, has also been recognized by international foreign offices as an outlet for travel warnings and guidance. This new channel of information allows for the creation of applications that bring current and high quality travel risk information to the mainstream. Our explorative research aims at investigating the role of the information source and target audience of such an application. The results of our analysis show no substantial evidence that user-generated travel risk information would be per se unsuitable as an information source. Further, our analysis revealed that frequent travelers as well as non-frequent Twitter users might be of special interest as a target group for the application.