Exploring park visitors’ activities in Hong Kong using geotagged photos

Understanding tourist activities could help attraction managers for appropriate planning and decision making. For a metropolitan city with limited land as Hong Kong, insight into what tourists have done in the urban area is vitally important. Tourists’ travel photos, tagged with geographical information, can assist attraction managers in identifying tourism hot spots and the activities that the visitors are interested in at certain spots. This study examined major visitor’s activities in the urban parks in Hong Kong by utilizing the geotagged photos posted on the social media sites. The results indicated that visitors had different interests in different parks. Moreover, the focuses of park visitors are different between local residents and international tourists. By spotting the photo locations, attraction managers can identify the tourists’ concentration so as to arrange better management on crowd control and visitors’ safety.