What does colour tell about tourist experiences?

Abstract

Tourist experiences are the product of a temporally extended series of events and activities. The temporal distance from actual experiences distorts the recalled evaluation of their experiences so tourists photograph to record their experiences and consume the place. Tourist photographs build a positive image of a destination when they effectively evoke positive feelings (i.e. affective image) and provide clear information about the physical and functional characteristics (i.e. cognitive image) of the destination. Despite its strong evocative power in constructing a meaning and assessing the place and experience, colour receives little attention in existing tourist photograph literature. Assuming colour as a proxy of tourist experiences, I explore whether, and how, colour in tourist photographs represents tourist experiences and destination consumption. The psychophysical paradigm, which proposes that the quality of the scenery or landscape reflects not only its intrinsic attributes but also the eyes of the beholder, provides a theoretical foundation. A purposely developed colour extraction and analysis tool identifies colour distribution patterns from 2,131 tourist photographs and Leximancer discovers word-like concepts (e.g. regular nouns and adjectives) from the corresponding comments and tags collected from the Facebook of Queensland Tourism Board in Australia. Findings reveal five distinctive groups based on colour distribution patterns and associated concepts. For example, tourist photographs of Fraser Coast show dominantly blue and secondarily orange whereas photographs of Sunshine Coast show balanced blue and orange. Tourist photographs from the destinations sharing similar geographic characteristics often display dissimilar colour patterns. It suggests that destinations can be grouped together by colour patterns and conceptual similarity, instead of geographical characteristics. The results further support that colours in tourist photographs are a significant representamen of tourist experiences and destination image.