Tourists visit and photo sharing behavior analysis: a case study of Hong Kong temples

Travel statistics report published by the tourism board was one of the important sources that attraction managers used to plan for marketing strategies. However, only a limited number of famous attractions were involved in such reports, therefore rare information was gathered for 2nd or 3rd tier attractions, such as temples. These small attractions were kept away from many tourists’ knowledge or travel plan so that it is also a difficulty to explore their visit behaviors. Fortunately, social media sites have been rapidly developed and widely used in our lives, to fill this blank with a large number of active users, who shared their travel experiences by writing textual comments and uploading travel photos. This provides scholars and managers with opportunities to understand tourists’ behaviors and the potential attractions they are interested in, by analyzing the photos they uploaded and shared online. In this paper, we report a study of extracting geotagged photos uploaded by tourists to one of the popular social media sites, Flickr, for tourists’ visit and sharing behavior analysis of Hong Kong temples. The results indicate four popular temples that attracted most tourists taking photos. The behavior analysis shows the difference preferences of tourists from various locations and the trend changes of their visits in the past 5 years.