1: Introduction

One of the major aspects of the digital era is the augmented growth of data. The amount of data generated by internet users these days is increasing unabated and IT people project 43% increase in yearly data generation by the end of 2020 (Reddy, 2016). Big data introduces undeniably great prospects to the tourism sector, by providing apprehensions to consumer preferences and facilitating them to restructure the complete travel experience (Akerkar, 2012). The period between 2005 and 2012, referred to as Analytics 2.0, is categorized by the employment of big data and analytics largely by online portals such as Google and Yahoo (Davenport, 2013). One of the most important aspects of big data indicates its large-scale bulk data sets are created every second of the day from a large number of sources, such as mobile phones and digital devices (Bello-Orgaza, 2015). For instance, reputed networks like Facebook produces over 500 terabytes of data (Maria, 2018), facilitating the growth of new data mining techniques.