Abstract
Knowing tourists’ preferences and experiences with respect to their national park visits is of great importance to implementing strategically sustainable development of national parks. Flickr geotagged photos are utilized and analyzed as our main data source. We included 7090 photos from 626 people in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to investigate visitors’ behaviors through the presentations of photo spatial and temporal patterns. The results indicated that tourist behaviors that reflect on what they like and enjoy during their park visits can be extracted from geotagged social media data in terms of frequency and length of enjoyment as visitors’ preferred spots.
Highlights
According to the National Park Service (NPS), fifty-nine national parks in the United States received over 80 million recreational visits in 2017 (NPS, 2016)
Despite various studies exploring geotagged photos in tourism research, most of them have been conducted at a city, state, or country level, and few studies have been done at a scenic spot scale, especially at a national park scale in the U.S This paper investigated the spatiotemporal characteristics of tourist preferences in the most visited national park in the U.S and focused on making contributions to knowledge about tourist behaviors and preferences within the national park system
It is found that the results of pictured hotspots were in consistent with popular attractions in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) ranked by users of TripAdvisor (2017), demonstrating the great potential of implementing geotagged photos data in investigating the tourist preferences for attractions
Summary
According to the National Park Service (NPS), fifty-nine national parks in the United States received over 80 million recreational visits in 2017 (NPS, 2016). Because of the proliferation of social media and the ubiquity of portable devices like smartphones, large geotagged datasets (e.g., geotagged texts, geotagged photos, geotagged videos, etc.) have become increasingly recognized over the past decade (Chua, Servillo, Marcheggiani, & Moere, 2016) These datasets can be used to extract spatiotemporal information, providing opportunities and directions for further concurrent tourism research. Numerous studies have been conducted and integrated with various approaches through geotagged photos (Donaire, Camprubí, & Galí, 2014; Li, Goodchild, & Xu, 2013; Majid, Chen, Mirza, Hussain, & Chen, 2015; Önder, Koerbitz, & Hubmann-Haidvogel, 2016; Sun, Fan, Bakillah, & Zipf, 2015; Vu, Li, Law, & Ye, 2015) The majority of these geotagged photo-related studies were previously conducted at a city, state, or country level, rather than at a scenic spot such as a specific national park
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