Photos as a tourism demand indicator: Social media provide a rich source of information for tourism management
(firmenpresse) - Viennese study on the benefits of the photo sharing platform Flickr reveals potential for directing tourist flows
Data from social media analyses are creating new opportunities for the targeted development of tourism offers. This is the conclusion reached by a study recently published by MODUL University Vienna and Vienna University of Economics and Business. In an interdisciplinary research study involving the fields of new media technologies and tourism research, the use of the photo-sharing platform Flickr was examined from the perspective of the tourism industry. Using over one million photos taken by holiday-makers in Austria, the study succeeded in identifying popular destinations and routes. This information could be highly valuable to tourism managers. Its potential uses include the optimization of city maps and tours with a view to creating new tourism access to less-frequented areas.
Bednights and ticket sales can provide information about the numbers of tourists who sleep in a place or visit certain attractions. But how do you identify the parks in which tourists relax and the streets and alleys they chose to explore? A study carried out by the Departments of Tourism and Service Management and New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna and Vienna University of Economics and Business has provided a possible answer to this question: through the 4.5 million photos uploaded daily to the photo sharing platform Flickr by over 51 million users. Many of the uploaded photos are taken on holidays. According to the current study, data from the Flickr profiles of tourists who visit Austria provide a source of practical data for tourism management.
City – country – the big picture
Crucial elements of these data are geotags, the longitudes and latitudes of the locations where the photos were taken, and descriptions of the photos. Their evaluation can provide invaluable information for the tourism sector, as Dr. Irem Önder from the Department of Tourism and Service Management explains: “You can pinpoint exactly where tourists prefer to hang out in a city – and where they do not. Using this knowledge, tourism mangers can react faster to the needs of visitors, and take measures to draw their attention to places that are equally worth seeing but less frequented.” Moreover, this approach can also be used to obtain information on visitor numbers to places that do not have an admissions system, for example parks.
For the study by Dr. Önder, Dr. Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel from the Department of New Media Technology, and Wolfgang Körbitz from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, over one million Flickr photos were examined and over 38,000 international tourists who visited Austria identified. The results of the study reveal major differences between urban and rural locations. Most of the holiday-makers who uploaded photos to their Flickr profiles with the tag “Austria” visited cities. Of these, the most popular destination was Vienna, followed by Salzburg and Innsbruck. The lowest number of tourists on Flickr visited the federal provinces of Burgenland and Vorarlberg. However, comparisons with bednight data show that this does not mean that visitor numbers to these regions were necessarily lower. Thus, data on Austria from Flickr profiles are specifically relevant for city tourism. Travelers mainly take photos of landmarks and other attractions that are more likely to be found in cities than in the country. Moreover, fewer photos are taken during activity holidays than on city trips. The seasons also play a role here: more photos are taken in summer when people tend to travel to cities than in winter.
Technology meets tourism
The study examined images from Flicker with a keyword reference to Austria which were uploaded by international tourists between January 2007 and December 2011. Comparison data were provided by information from the online tourism database TourMIS, whose data on bednights, arrivals, and capacities originate from Statistics Austria. To collect the data from Flickr, Dr. Hubmann-Haidvogel developed an application which extracted publicly accessible information about the users and their photos, such as photo descriptions, geographical locations, and the dates on which the photos were taken. With the help of this app, it was possible to obtain 1,183,889 photos and subsequently identify 38,080 international tourists among the Flickr users.
This successful cooperation between the tourism and new media departments links two leading areas of teaching and research at MODUL University Vienna, and demonstrates the wide-ranging uses that can be made of web data. “We need more efficient ways of collecting data so that tourism managers can react faster to the interests and needs of visitors. Traditional methods are expensive and time consuming. We have found a fast and simple solution with our Flickr analysis,” says Dr. Önder, expressing her firm belief in the advantages social media data have to offer to the tourism sector.
Original publication: Tracing Tourists by Their digital Footprints: The Case of Austria
http://jtr.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/12/17/0047287514563985.full.pdf?ijkey=SeRgs5S9bAnBhTQ&keytype=finite
About MODUL University Vienna (status: March 2015)
MODUL University Vienna is an international private university in Austria and is owned by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. It offers study programs (BBA, BSc, MSc, MBA and PhD programs) in the areas of international business and management, new media technology, public governance & administration and sustainable development, as well as tourism and hospitality management. The study programs meet strict accreditation guidelines and, due to their international focus, are conducted in English. The university campus is located at Kahlenberg, in Vienna’s 19th district. The research focus of the Department of Tourism and Service Management includes the areas of travel flows and competitor analysis, tourism and information systems, media analyses and semantic technologies, empirical behavioral research in travel and leisure, and sustainable tourism, and thus combines tourism research with new media technologies.
Leseranfragen:
Scientific Contact:
Dr. Irem Önder
MODUL University Vienna
Department of Tourism and Service Management
Am Kahlenberg 1
1190 Vienna, Austria
T +43 / 1 / 320 35 55 - 420
E irem.onder(at)modul.ac.at
W http://www.modul.ac.at/
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Datum: 11.03.2015 - 15:03 Uhr
Sprache: Deutsch
News-ID 377748
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contact information:
Contact person: Till C. Jelitto
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Vienna
Phone: 01 505 70 44
Kategorie:
Tourism
Typ of Press Release: Erfolgsprojekt
type of sending: Veröffentlichung
Date of sending: 11.03.2015
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