The master’s thesis with the title “Overtourism destination: Finding the positive message in overtourism DMOs social media” (Limbu, 2022), which was published in 2022 by Dil Kumar Limbu at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies at the University of Eastern Finland, analyses how destination marketing organisations (DMOs) deal with the issue of overtourism in their social media marketing, especially on Facebook.
The thesis makes a qualitative analysis of two different DMO Facebook accounts; Visit Reykjavik and I Amsterdam, over the course of a year.
Unfortunately, the thesis was not created alongside a workpiece, which could have been used to dive deeper into the topic. Generally, I would have hoped to find a more design-heavy thesis on the topic, but did not succeed unfortunately, which is why this analysis focuses more on how the scientific background and analysis of media content could look.
Overall presentation quality
Scientifically, the thesis fulfils a fairly high standard with a well-reasoned methodology and a thorough overview of the most important scientific backgrounds as well as a comprehensive presentation of the current knowledge pool. All this information is presented in a well-structured manner that is easy to follow.
Degree of innovation
While part of the thesis was used to sum up and explain existing ideas and terms in marketing and tourism, the main core of Limbu’s work could be considered innovative, for connecting the topics social media marketing and overtourism as well as for deducting an independent in-depth analysis of Facebook posts.
Independence
This also speaks for the student’s independence, seeing as the research conducted has not been done in this way before, meaning a completely new and independent analysis structure had to be developed.
Organization and structure
The thesis is structured into an introduction, explaining the background, objective and approach of the study, a main part where different terms and ideas around marketing, social media in tourism and over-tourism are explained, then a methodology part talking more about the conducted analysis and an in-depth discussion of the results as well as a conclusion, summarising the whole thesis and taking a look into the future.
Communication
Overall, the thesis is well structured, however, concerning the quality of the written text I found the language to be a bit lacking at times, with some sentences being either grammatically wrong or too vague to properly grasp the conveyed idea. This sometimes made it difficult to follow the point made and was generally detrimental to the effectiveness of the communication.
Scope
For each of the chapters, an appropriate and balanced number of pages was allocated, leading to the feeling that the thesis had an appropriate length and scope for the treated topic. With a page number of around 50, the scope also seems appropriate for a master’s thesis.
Accuracy and attention to detail
As I have mentioned before, the attention to detail was focused more on the scientific work and the discussed results, and less so on the linguistic finetuning of the text. While the scientific content is arguably very important, it is unfortunate when the style of the written text distracts from the actual content instead of properly supporting the scientific results.
Literature
The thesis includes an 8 page long, comprehensive literature list, which to the best of my knowledge includes a well-balanced mixture of articles, books and various webpages. While I have not checked each and every one of these sources, the ones I looked up all seemed to be of appropriate quality and credibility for usage in a master’s thesis.
Conclusion
The thesis I chose to evaluate was unfortunately not written in the field of media, which is why there was no workpiece to analyse and the overall style and focus of the work might not have been what will be expected from our theses. Nonetheless, I found it interesting to see how another student from another field has approached and analysed the topic of media and overtourism, or at least part of it. The scientific work in the thesis seems to be sound and very thoroughly conducted, leading to newly synthesised information. However, one of the weak points of the thesis for me was the linguistic style and some of the errors made, which impeded the reading flow whilst analysing the thesis. Nonetheless, the thesis certainly fulfils a high scientific standard and provides valuable information on the topic.
Literature
Limbu, D. K. (2022). Overtourism destination: Finding the positive message in overtourism DMOs social media.
