Minding the Gap Between Perceived and Projected Destination Image by Using Information and Communication Platforms and Software

Background

Photographs play a crucial role in the promotion of tourism destinations and they should be seen as legitimate agents of inquiry although tourism research has favored textual data over visual data (Balomenou and Garrod, 2019, Kavoura and Nechita, 2017). Researchers have been relatively slow to capitalise on the potential of visual data analysis techniques (Garrod, 2007) while researchers have brought out the benefits that exist when perceived online destination images are taken into consideration in the promotional efforts of managers in charge of projected online destination images (Stepchenkova and Zhan, 2013, Michaelidou, Siamagka, Moraes and Micevski, 2013, Mak, 2017). Research (Pan, Lee and Tsai, 2014) has indicated that photos are more suited to reflect the affective images of places from tourists’ perspectives. Extracting and understanding tourists’ point of interest from geotagged photos has been the focus of many researchers (Kisilevich, Mansmann, Bak, Keim and Tchaikin, 2010). The image-based content sharing platforms typically have higher rates of geo-tagging. For example, 80% of images in the now-defunct Google Panoramio were geotagged, and most Flickr photos are geotagged where Flickr is the second social medium mostly used where the extraction of useful content from images and videos is easier from tags from content sharing web sites (Bae and Yun, 2017).