Different cultures, different photos: A comparison of Shanghai's pictorial destination image between East and West

Abstract

Inbound tourists' destination image (DI) perceptions can inform overseas marketing of destinations. This study proposes a new method to compare DI differences among inbound tourists. Based on a photo metadata set from Flickr, this article takes Shanghai as an example and employs large-scale metadata from user-generated photos to retrieve the destination image of Shanghai's inbound tourists. Inbound tourists were divided into Eastern and Western groups according to their profile information. Results show that Shanghai's DI as manifested in Eastern and Western tourists' photos differ in cognitive and affective aspects. Findings shed light on DI differences comparison when using a massive set of user-generated photos.