Monitoring North African regional tourism by web data

The purpose of this article is to explore the opportunity of recent and detailed unconventional data from the tourism sector collected from « Booking.com » to make a finer and more up-to-date analysis than that established by conventional data, particularly, at the territorial level of North Africa. We extracted and geolocalised about 40 variables of different types covering 1852 accommodations on Booking.com to analyze the characteristics of territorial tourist offer of the six North African countries (10 of 12 Moroccan regions, 3 of 13 Mauritanian Wilayas, 26 of 48 Algerian Wilayas, 13 of 24 Tunisian Governorates, 1 region of Libya, 15 of 27 Egyptian Mohafazats). Then, we used a random sample of 10% of the most recent appreciations of nearly 606000 tourists of the three most dynamic destinations (Marrakech-Safi, Tunis, Cairo) by analyzing the feelings of their comments with a differentiation according origin of tourists. We concluded that the accommodation offer of the territories of North Africa is very diversified and unclassified offers are slightly better appreciated compared to those classified. The coastal regions have higher prices compared to the interior of the countries and quality-price appreciation of North African regions is below their overall ratings.