“Understanding Thailand’s tourism industry from the perspective of tweets: A qualitative content analysis using NVivo 12.0”

Social media provide a variety of possibilities for tourist destination selection and bring new opportunities and challenges to the development of Thailand’s tourism industry. This study aims to examine Thailand’s tourism development through the lens of social media users via content analysis and find ways to improve Thailand’s tourism marketing strategies within social media. A dataset consisting of 10,008 tweets was utilized. Grounded theory is conducted to finish the open coding, axis coding


INTRODUCTION
As a world-class tourism destination, Thailand has also experienced the test of the COVID-19 pandemic (Ryu et al., 2023).Thailand has excellent natural scenery and a rich cultural intangible heritage, attracting many tourists worldwide (Luekveerawattana, 2012).Tourism has become a significant industry in Thailand (Ryu et al., 2023).
In 2022, the number of foreign tourists in Thailand exceeded 9 million, and the tourism revenue reached 1.27 trillion Baht (Sudsawasd et al., 2022).The Thai government has set the tourism revenue target for 2023 as 1.73 billion Baht, or 46.2 billion US dollars, 80% of the level before the epidemic outbreak in 2019 (Sudsawasd et al., 2022).Among them, foreign tourists contributed 970 billion Baht of tourism revenue, while domestic tourists contributed 760 billion Baht.It is estimated that by the end of 2022, Thailand will receive 10 million international tourists (Fakfare & Wattanacharoensil, 2023).
The Thai government has been cooperating with relevant public and private sectors and tourism operators to jointly determine and implement tourism promotion measures and focus on increasing high-qual-ity tourists in Thailand (Chaisawat, 2006).To attract tourists, Thailand has relaxed its tourist visa policy and opened many film tourism destinations to attract tourists (Gelbman & Timothy, 2010).Therefore, Thailand's tourism development is still a severe topic after the COVID-19 pandemic (Ryu et al., 2023).While obtaining more benefits, Thailand should shoulder the responsibility of tourism and promote the sustainable development of Thailand's tourism (Intason et al., 2021).
Using Twitter as a research tool, significant breakthroughs have been made in exploring cutting-edge topics such as AI tourism, sustainable tourism development, and digital tourism (Hays et al., 2013).As one of the primary social media, Twitter is a natural travel topic bank.Although it is not a new method to explore the secrets of tourism development through social media, the vast amount of information in social media undoubtedly gives some clues to Thailand's tourism development research (Martin-Domingo et al., 2019).It is also a window to study and understand Thailand's tourism development.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Tourism development in Thailand is a macro concept, and many scholars try to explore the secrets of tourism development in Thailand.In recent years, Thailand has made outstanding achievements in tourism development (Intason et al., 2021).Regarding carbon dioxide emissions in Thailand's tourism development, while cruise tourism and ports in Thailand have made extraordinary contributions to Thailand's tourism development, the pollution costs of exhaust gas and waste oil on the sea are also severe (Fethi & Senyucel, 2021).
In addition, a breakthrough has been made in solving the problem of village poverty through tourism.Therefore, Thailand's promotion of sustainable tourism, including urban tourism development and sustainable tourism practices, has won much applause (Muangasame & McKercher, 2015).Thailand has rich tourism resources and diversified tourism models, which can create many tourist attractions worldwide (Ryu et al., 2023).In addition to urban and island tourism, the research on ecotourism, medical tourism, and military tourism has become increasingly prominent, and the models for different tourism models have matured (Hunt & Stronza, 2014).
In order to explore the potential of Thailand's tourism development in the digital era, Thailand tried to investigate the competitiveness of global tourism destinations to determine the positive impact of service marketing strategies on tourism and hotel enterprises (Sobaih et al., 2021), especially the operators of non-tourism destinations and small towns visited by only a few tourists (Lai et al., 2017).Thai tourism and hotel service operators must attach importance to sustainable development, starting from upstream processes such as research and development, using local wisdom, reflecting cultural characteristics, and paying attention to downstream activities, including modern media (Buathong & Lai, 2017).
COVID-19 has a strong negative impact on Thai tourism, and it is imperative to segment the market and attract new tourists in the post-COVID-19 stage (Li et al., 2023).Thailand actively seeks sustainable tourism development methods to forecast the future development of tourism (Chansuk et al., 2022).The academia analyzed the current economic situation of world tourism and explored the predictive factors of Thailand's tourism development participation to help stakeholders manage tourism development more effectively during COVID-19 (Yan et al., 2021).
Thailand's tourism development pays special attention to attracting tourists and achieving sustainable tourism development (Gong et al., 2019).Tourism recovery after COVID-19 is also the focus of research (Yan et al., 2021).Progress has indeed been made in discussing Thailand's tourism development from the consumers' perspective, the tourism market, and tourism policies (Ditta-Apichai et al., 2020).Social media is a new opportunity for tourism development (Park & Oh, 2012).However, more research must be conducted on Thailand's tourism development among Twitter users.Therefore, the attempt of this study is of epochal significance and can also guide Thailand's tourism development in a new direction and provide a new perspective and explanation.Social media is not only a way of communication but also has the potential to foster the development of the tourism industry.Therefore, social media for tourism development are significant achievements and direction in the digital economy and social media era (Picco-Schwendener et al., 2022).
In the context of social media for developing Thailand tourism, Xu et al. (2017) proposed developing game applications to promote cultural tourism in Thailand.Charoensukmongkol and Sasatanun (2017) explored the remarkable contribution of social media marketing capabilities to the business performance of Thai enterprises.Agyeiwaah et al. (2019) reviewed the research on food tourism in Thailand and believed that the consumption behavior and destination marketing of food tourism in Thailand in the future are the main directions.Pholphirul et al. (2022) determined the positive impact of social media service marketing strategy on Thai tourism and hotel enterprises.Although Thailand's tourism development has made some achievements with social media support, many dimensions still have not been explored.In order to promote the development of social media for Thai tourism, Thai tourism research can learn from the application and development of other nations' tourism in social media (Nusair et al., 2019).
As one of the world's foremost social media, Twitter has many customers and an open comment environment (Feizollah et al., 2021).For a long time, it has been an essential tool and platform for social media content analysis, bringing forth new ideas for tourism research and development.Social media is the most preferred platform for sentiment analysis (Martin-Domingo et al., 2019).Twitter data are about how people feel about popular travel websites.Although the tourism market in Thailand has grown by leaps and bounds, only some achievements have been found in the sentiment analysis of social media applications of Twitter travelers on Thai travel (Leelawat et al., 2022).At present, only a few studies are about the complex process involved in the loyalty of Twitter users to Thailand as a tourist destination.However, there are many research cases about Twitter data serving other tourism countries, which may be the weakness of Thailand's tourism research (Claster et al., 2013).
The value of tweets as a sentiment analysis has been verified in the tourism situations of Malaysia, China, the United States, Europe, and Australia (Mishra et al., 2021).The sentiment analysis of Twitter data is mainly used to research national image, tourism city image, and tourism destination.Therefore, social media, especially Twitter, is an innovative and meaningful undertaking to study Thailand's tourism development.
Following the literature review, this paper aims to reveal the purpose and conceptual framework of Thailand's tourism development in social media utilizing qualitative coding by analyzing tweets related to Thailand's tourism development and putting forward more clues and suggestions for future research on Thailand's tourism development.

METHODS
The analysis retrieved the topics on Twitter and used Ncapture to obtain the interface.Table 1 introduces the topics and the number of tweets: Tourism development in Thailand (3), the Tourism industry in Thailand (53), Thailand tourism industry (287), Thailand tourism development (5), Tourism in Thailand (664), Thailand tourism (5485), Tourists visit Thailand (3), Travel to Thailand (840), and Thailand travel (2706).Then, the study deleted a few keywords with a small number of tweets and finally left 6 search words, including 10008 tweets, forming a total of 6 files.Table 1 summarizes these six topics and quantities.Nvivo 12.0 is a software specially used for processing qualitative and quantitative content data (Ram & Titarenko, 2022).It has been widely used in tourism and social media research, helping this paper complete the theme analysis of 10,008 tweets.The study uses grounded theory to encode 10008 tweets in three levels.The third-level themes are some concepts abstracted from a large number of tweets.The second-level themes continue to be abstracted from the third-level themes.Some third-level themes fall into the second-level themes.Therefore, there are no third-level themes in some abstract perspectives.The end of the abstract process is saturation, which means that the primary theme is the most abstract part, which is conducive to the direct understanding of the conceptual theme of Thailand's tourism development.
After three levels of topic coding, 11 first-level themes were obtained.However, there are many reference nodes for two themes."Social Backlash" has 286 reference tweets; the content of these tweets is the same.They are all "Now a growing social backlash is creating the industry."Therefore, the study excludes this topic, and the same method excludes "Horrific brutality," which has 230 tweet references.The references to "Horrific brutality" are all "Horrific brutality and it occurs because of TOURISTS!"Hence, the study finally obtained nine first-level themes that can be used to explain Thailand's tourism development from the social media perspective.Table 2 to Table 10 systematically describe the process of theme coding, the code name, the number of coding references, and relevant documents.

RESULTS
Theme coding is one of the main methods of abstracting concepts from text and a common guide to grounder theory (Chun Tie et al., 2019).In general, the three-level theme coding method is more reasonable when addressing tweet analysis (Adewole et al., 2020).Through three-level theme coding, the study determined that the development of the tourism industry includes several elements: tourism attraction, revolutionary risks, tourism industry, medical tourism, tourism destinations, tourism organization, and tourism opportunities.Specifically, tourism industry development can be defined as organizations focusing on opportunities and challenges in the tourism industry and exploring various tourism development opportunities in terms of tourism attraction and destination.
There are many tourist attractions in Thailand.Sex, cannabis, agriculture, medical care, mountain areas, and cross-country tourism have become the main attractions.In particular, 130 reference points for type tourism occupy the leading position in tourism attraction.Social media tourists pay special attention to the content of sex tourism in Thailand.Medical tourism is another major attraction in Thailand.
With the legalization of cannabis in Thailand, weed tourism has gradually emerged in social media.Although its appeal is not as attractive as sex and medical care, Twitter users have begun to accept cannabis tourism in Thailand, which is both an opportunity and a challenge for tourism development.
The tweet analysis of tourism development in Thailand claims that tourism headwinds and brutality are the main risks of tourism development.Furthermore, in coping with risks, the rapid recovery of the tourism industry has also become one of the issues.Domestic and foreign tourists together constitute the content of Thailand's tourism development, but foreigners still come to Thailand for tourism.In Table 2, foreign tourism has 20 reference points.
In terms of Thai tourism organizations, in order to promote tourism in Thailand, the evidence of tweets has revealed that promoters, administration, visa policies, tourism cooperation, and tourism ambassadors may all be involved in the work of Thai tourism organizations.To promote Thailand's tourism development, these may be the main contents that the official should try.In order to understand the connotation of tourist development in Thailand, the study used three-level theme coding to obtain 188 reference points in tweets.The source of tourists is key to the develop-ment of tourists.Table 3 introduces Thai tourists in tweets mainly from Singapore, France, South Korea, India, China, and Russia.Among them, Indian and Russian tourists are the most prominent.Since October, Thailand has long been one of the main tourist destinations for Russian tourists.Due to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese tourists have yet to return to Thailand for the time being.Therefore, Chinese tourists need to be more evident on social media.The results also warn that Thai tourism should actively catch Russian and Indian tourists when China has not officially promoted international tourism.By the way, tourists from other countries in Southeast Asia still deserve attention.
In addition to tourist types, the study found that tourist development also includes pre-COVID-19 tourists, tourist markets, and Haul tourists.
Obviously, from the secondary themes in Table 3, the study summarized that the development of Thai tourists should pay attention to the scenic spots, regions, and awareness issues that tourists are interested in.However, paying attention to the source countries of tourists and how to serve tourists from different countries are the main work contents of developing Thai tourists.After coding and analyzing the content in the tweet, 392 references were obtained that can explain the development of travel, which is involved in almost every file.As one of the leading guides to attract tourists in the process of tourism development, tourism stories are prominent in thematic analysis with 153 reference points.Tourist stories cover a wide range of subjects.The development of Thai tourism is a concept mainly serving the Thai tourism economy.After analyzing the tweets coding, a level 1 code named Thailand perspective is extracted.Table 6 indicates that Thai policies, operators, Thai people, trips, markets, and Thai language schools are involved under this code.Specifically, Thailand's perspectives reveal that the minds of social media users are that Thailand's tourism development has a positive impact on all aspects of Thai development and has a role for the people, policy, market, and even language schools.On the contrary, Thailand should actively encourage attention to these contents to promote its tourism development.Visited Thailand 2 4 Thailand trip 2 2 Pergi Thailand 1 1 Thai markets 2 4 Thai language school 1 1 Elephants are an essential part of Thai tourism because elephants are not only an animal in Thailand but also a collateral cultural tourism value.Indeed, the coding of elephant tourism development with 312 reference nodes was extracted from tweets.Table 8 explains the understanding of elephants in Thai tourism development through social media tourism from multiple perspectives.Elephant tourism (230) has naturally become the first central theme.
Wild elephants and British elephant torture in Thailand are significant concerns.Although miracle elephants, elephant performances, and unforgettable elephant travel are actively conscious of Twitter users, the damage to elephants and problems with the wildlife environment caused by Thai tourism development are more likely to draw their attention.Therefore, while developing tourism, Thailand needs to pay attention to the protection and care of elephants, try to get along with them in harmony and use their talents to create more distinctive and attractive cultures.Among the tweets on Thai tourism development, 143 reference points on cannabis were extracted.As a level 1 code, cannabis is the result of the legalization of Thai cannabis.Currently, many studies are focusing on the development of Thai cannabis.Even social media tweets claim that Bangkok will become Amsterdam in Southeast Asia.In Table 9, cannabis discrimination (62) and cannabis businesses (68) become the main secondary headings, which means that the issue of cannabis should be taken into account in tourism development in Thailand.In addition, the cannabis market, industry, and investment also gradually appear in the Thai tourism process.A social media interpretation of cannabis in Thailand's tourism development should make the Thai government aware of these issues.The development of Thai tourism is not only beneficial to Thailand.As one of the significant tourist countries in Southeast Asia and even the world, the significance of Thai tourism to the development of Asia is evident.Table 9 highlights the importance of Thai tourism development to Asian countries, as evidenced by 130 reference points in Asian nations.In addition, the location, trails, styles, and destinations of Asian countries have become topics of interest to social media users.Therefore, Thailand must broaden its horizon and pay more attention to the impact of tourism on Asia and even the world.On the other hand, Asian tourism is clear, and Thailand is also one of the leading destinations for Twitter users.Hence, the Thai government needs to establish its positive image in Asian travel countries to attract more tourists.Word frequency analysis is a method to help study the more prominent keywords in the explana-tory texts and to identify the hot topics of tourism development in Thailand (Taecharungroj & Mathayomchan, 2019).All codes are analyzed using the word frequency analysis function.In the exact matching mode, the top 200 words are selected as text rendering, and the words unrelated to content analysis (website vocabulary, time vocabulary, Thai vocabulary) are deleted.Finally, Figure 1 portrays the content.
Figure 1 illustrates that Thai tourism development is mainly based on international tourism.The three main themes are "Thailand, tourism, and international."Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, and Sukhothai have become the prominent tourism places.Elephants and monkeys are also reflected in the word cloud as important animals to watch in Thai tourism.In addition, digitization, social networking, media, and participation have entered the subject vocabulary.The entry of the emotional vocabulary (brutality, please, congratulations) into the vocabulary cloud reflects how social media tourists feel about traveling in Thailand.In addition, food, sex, island, photo, and weeds have become popular vocabulary as a popular object of Thai tourism.
From the analysis of word frequency, the international tourism development of Thailand has made some achievements in the construction of tourist cities.The attention of social media to Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, and Sukhothai shows that Thai tourist natural landscape cities and cultural attractions may attract tourists from all over the world.In addition, under the influence of digitization and social media, animal sightings, food, sex, islands, photos, and weed are popular consumption content of Thai tourists.Thai tours are generally exciting and comfortable, but chaos does harm tourists.
Using automatic coding facilitates the rapid recognition of emotional expressions in tweets.Autocoding moods can determine if the text's overall tone is positive or negative (Stolard, 2020).Content analysis is a complex process.Through the sentiment analysis of tweets, it is easier to reveal the accuracy of users' perceptions of Thai tourism development.
The study used Nvivo 12.0 to conduct sentiment analysis on all the level 1 theme coding and yielded the results in Table 11.From the social media perspective, the results reveal that those negative emotions are more evident than positive emotions regarding tourism development in Thailand.
Twitter users are particularly harmful about elephant tourism, tourist development, and tourism for Asian development because they have the most reference points.There are still some unreasonable aspects in dealing with elephants, tourists, and tourism patterns in Thai tourism.In order to further promote the development of Thai tourism, Thailand may need to take further measures to solve these problems.By Pearson correlation coefficient analysis, the study concludes that cannabis and the development of cities have some similarities and form a cluster, indicating that there may be some relationship between them.
The similarity between Thailand's and travel development perspectives indicates that Thai tourism is closely related to the development of Thailand, forming a cluster.On this basis, this distance cluster continues to cluster with the developed tourism industry.It describes that the development of the Thai tourism industry impacts all aspects of Thai development.
In the same way, there is a similar relationship between tourism for Asian development and the development of tourists, which means that the de- Current achievements mainly focus on the environmental problems caused by island tourism, ecotourism, and agricultural tourism in Thailand and have tried to solve the dilemma through some research.
However, tourists and social media play an increasingly important role in the digital age, and tourist reviews and views are essential in destination choices (Pencarelli, 2020).Few studies have focused on the connotation and dimension of Thai tourism development from the social media perspective.In terms of sustainable tourism ecology in Thailand, this paper finds that social media users are particularly concerned about the living environment of elephants, monkeys, and other animals.
As an important tourism destination, destination image, food, satisfaction, and policy have become the main factors affecting the tourism destination in Thailand.This paper explores the importance of Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket as tourist destinations from social media.The attractiveness of these destinations is important in Twitter as well as from natural landscapes.
In addition, current research focuses on Thailand's attractiveness and influencing factors as a tourist destination.However, little attention has been paid to the tourism and social problems caused by tourists, sex, marijuana, riots, and how to avoid these problems, which also pose challenges to the development of Thai tourism.
Nevertheless, the analysis is just about tweeting.
Twitter is one of the leading social media representatives and only summarizes some social media's understanding of Thai tourism development.Although this study provides a new way to answer the tourism question in Thailand, there is still much social media to explore.
Secondly, the study has excavated a lot of information conducive to Thai tourism development, such as scenic spots, cooperation, markets, destinations, and other concepts.Future research can quantitatively explore the correlation between these contents and Thai tourism development to build a Thai tourism development model under social media.Finally, as the primary source of tourism revenue, improving the satisfaction of tourists is the primary channel for the profit of tourism operations.This paper uses dynamic analysis to determine Twitter users' positive and negative feelings about tourism in Thailand.
Therefore, future research can seek ways of improving social media users' satisfaction with tourism in Thailand.At the same time, different tourist attraction modes should exist for different countries.Therefore, the role of social media in tourism development in Thailand is just the beginning, and there is still much to discuss and explore in the future.

CONCLUSION
The research objective was to scrutinize the evolution of Thailand's tourism sector through a content analysis of user-generated discourse on social media platforms.From the tweet, this paper digs and codes the content related to Thai tourism and studies nine dimensions that can reveal the development of Thai tourism.From the result of the theme code, tourism development in Thailand is a comprehensive concept involving tourism, travel, travelers, and scenic spots.It may impact the Thai economy, the Thai people, and Asian countries.Moreover, Thailand is facing many opportunities and challenges in tourism development.With its rich tourist attractions, Thailand has received many tourists from Russia and Asia.It has actively participated in tourism cooperation, establishing opportunities for Japan-Thailand and Thailand-Europe tourism cooperation.
Under the Tourism Expo and APEC background, there are more opportunities for Thai tourism development.However, with the rapid development of the tourism economy, the study emphasizes the possible problems.For example, sex, drugs, turmoil, tourists, ecological destruction, and animal injury may negatively impact tourism development, but tourists are also more concerned about the content.At the same time, the study further defined the responsibility and mission of Thai tourism development.Thai tourism development should further emphasize the concept of sustainability and actively integrate into Asian countries' tourism development cooperation to encourage more countries to join the sustainable tourism development camp.Finally, the study encourages Thai tourism development to pay attention to the role of social media and intensify the research on social media to promote Thai tourism development.The Thai government and tourism departments should further standardize the tourism market to create a more peaceful environment.At the same time, these stakeholders need to devote more enthusiasm to policy and management to obtain tourism benefits and create healthy sexual and medical tourism models to attract more international tourists.At the same time, as a world-class tourism country, it undertakes the mission of sustainable development, seeks more opportunities for international tourism cooperation, creates a perfect ecological tourism circle, and forms a high-quality image of the tourism country.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The word frequency analysis results

Table 1 .
The topics captured and the number of tweets

Table 2 .
Theme coding process of the development of the tourism industry

Table 3 .
Theme coding process of the development of tourists

Table 4 .
The theme coding process of the development of travel

Table 5
Amazing travel stories and Travel legends convey the attractiveness of travel stories in Thai tourism development as one of the main contents; building and digging into tourism stories is vital.

Table 5 .
The theme coding process of the tourism story

Table 6 .
The theme coding process of the Thailand perspective

Table 7 .
The theme coding process of the development of cities

Table 8 .
The theme coding process of the elephant tourism development

Table 9 .
The theme coding process of the cannabis

Table 10 .
The theme coding process of the tourism for Asian development

Table 11 .
Results of sentiment analysis