Study on the hotspots of urban tourism spaces based on Instagram-Worthy locations data: Taking Beijing as an example

Abstract

As the mobile Internet emerges, numerous Instagram-worthy locations gradually constitute new spaces of urban tourism. For instance, the Xiaohongshu application, a community with shared content, has increasingly become a platform for people to share well-known tourist attractions, providing a new perspective for the study of the popularity of tourism spaces. On the basis of data of ticking off Instagram-worthy locations from the Xiaohongshu application, the present study aims to identify tourism hotspots in Beijing, analyze their spatial characteristics, and explore their evolution features from two dimensions of time and space. In addition, the emotional images of tourism hotspots in Beijing are interpreted by semantic analysis with an internal mechanism that influences those locations explored. The results of the study show that (1) the overall spatial structure of tourism hotspots in Beijing is C-shaped, which expands from the core area to the periphery with the feature of a circle layer. (2) under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the spatial distribution center of tourism hotspots in Beijing is gradually shifting to the Southeast with the tendency of expanding to the surrounding suburbs. (3) the reception and serviceability of the tourist attractions have a significant influence on the popularity of tourism hotspots. To date, less research has been focused on the data of ticking off emerging Instagram-worthy locations like the Xiaohongshu application, and there is a dearth of the study related to in-depth excavation of the internal influencing mechanism of their popularity. This paper, therefore, under the interaction of virtual and reality, provides new ideas and methods for studying the popularity of urban tourist attractions.