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This research introduces online travel photos published on social media platforms as a complementary data resource to examine the behavior and experience of museum visitors. The practical value of online travel photos is demonstrated through a case study of popular Hong Kong museums, particularly by using the photo content and metadata available from the Flickr platform. The proposed approach is a generic method for understanding museum visitor behavior and preferences, and supports museum practitioners in developing improved products for visitors. The case study findings are particularly beneficial for tourism managers, especially those in Hong Kong, in promoting and attracting tourists to visit local museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the inefficiency in analyzing the comprehensive travel data, tourism managers are facing the challenge of gaining insights into travelers’ behavior and preferences. In most cases, existing techniques are incapable of capturing the sequential patterns hidden in travel data. To address these issues, this article proposes to analyze the travelers’ behavior through geotagged photos and sequential rule mining. Travel diaries, constructed from the photo sequences, can capture comprehensive travel information, and then sequential patterns can be discovered to infer the potential destinations. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated in a case study of Australian outbound tourism, using a data set of more than 890,000 photos from 3,623 travelers. The introduced framework has the potential to benefit tourism researchers and practitioners from capturing and understanding the behaviors and preferences of travelers. The findings can support destination-marketing organizations (DMOs) in promoting appropriate destinations to prospective travelers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some countries have places with foreign-like scenery that attracts domestic visitors to enjoy overseas-like travel experiences. However, such overseas-like travel experiences have not been widely utilized for domestic tourism development. This is likely due to the lack of awareness among the scientific community and tools for effectively identifying such travel experiences. To address the related gaps and technical challenges, this paper investigates the potential of abroad-at-home as a type of domestic tourism for promoting domestic tourism. This paper also introduces a novel technique called concept modeling that identifies abroad-at-home travel experiences from travel photos taken within a country. A case study on a large-scale dataset of more than 265,000 geotagged travel photos taken in Australia demonstrated the effectiveness of this method. The proposed method and findings are valuable for tourism organizations that use abroad-at-home travel experiences for domestic tourism development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]