Abstract
Social media plays an important role in tourism industry, especially for individual travel planning and tourism entities preparing business plans. Only a limited number of first-tier attractions were reported in tourism bureau’s travel statistics documents, which cannot satisfy the needs of non-first tier attraction managers preparing their marketing strategies. With the rich tourists reviews and photos publicly available on social network platform, researchers and attraction manager could analyzing these geotagged photos to find out the potentials of the attractions including tourists interests and their travel pattern. In this study, we report our work on extracting and processing of geotagged photos uploaded by inbound tourists on Flickr.com to study tourists’ photo sharing and visiting pattern during their visits at Hong Kong temples. Four popular temples were identified automatically using P-DBSCAN density clustering from geotagged tourists photos. The travel pattern analysis had shown that tourists from different country of residence have different temple choice. Particularly, a closer look at the repeated tourists in the past five years, and special focus on photo uploading habits are discussed in our findings.
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The work presented in this paper was partly supported by ISU Research Project Grant funded by I-Shou University, Taiwan (ISU-104-08-02A).
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This paper is an extended and updated version of a conference paper titled ‘Tourists Visit and Photo Sharing Behavior Analysis: A Case Study of Hong Kong Temples’ previously published in the proceedings of Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016 Conference (ENTER 2016) held in Bilbao, Spain, February 2–5, 2016.
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Leung, R., Vu, H.Q. & Rong, J. Understanding tourists’ photo sharing and visit pattern at non-first tier attractions via geotagged photos. Inf Technol Tourism 17, 55–74 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0078-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0078-3