De Cuypere, ElineDe Turck, KoenFiems, Dieter2024-04-262024-04-262014https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/48700previously providedNowadays, potential tourists base their purchase decisions on traveler’s experiences, comments and opinions posted in online travel forums. The propagation of online tourism-related messages is therefore of majorimportance for the tourism industry. Hence, we propose a model for the dynamics of single opinion propagation as a result of messages posted in an online travel forum. In particular, opinion spreading is modeled as a Markovian non-standard epidemic model. Indeed, opinion propagation in social networks holds many qualitative similarities with infectious diseases spread. We evaluate the performance of such systems by an approximate efficient solution technique, illustrate our approach by means of numerical examples and conclude our work.Opinion propagation; Online travel forums; Epidemic model; MacLaurin series expansion; Performance analysis.event