Strategic Sustainable Development Through the Lenses of Tourists’ Preferences: A Geotagged Photo Approach

Abstract

Knowing tourists’ preferences and experiences with respect to their national park visits is of great importance to implementing strategically sustainable development of national parks. Flickr geotagged photos are utilized and analyzed as our main data source. We included 7090 photos from 626 people in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to investigate visitors’ behaviors through the presentations of photo spatial and temporal patterns. The results indicated that tourist behaviors that reflect on what they like and enjoy during their park visits can be extracted from geotagged social media data in terms of frequency and length of enjoyment as visitors’ preferred spots.