Travel Guides for Creative Tourists, Powered by Geotagged Social Media

TL;DR

This paper explores using geotagged social media data to create neighborhood guides that reveal the local, everyday life of a city, catering to tourists seeking authentic experiences beyond traditional sightseeing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to building social-media-powered neighborhood guides using geotagged data, highlighting insights into local life that traditional guides overlook.

Findings

Social media reveals idealized local life for tourists.

Social media data lacks user base consistency but offers unique insights.

Proposed design improves tourist experience by showcasing authentic neighborhoods.

Abstract

Many modern tourists want to know about everyday life and spend time like a local in a new city. Current tools and guides typically provide them with lists of sights to see, which do not meet their needs. Manually building new tools for them would not scale. However, public geotagged social media data, like tweets and photos, have the potential to fill this gap, showing users an interesting and unique side of a place. Through three studies surrounding the design and construction of a social-media-powered Neighborhood Guides website, we show recommendations for building such a site. Our findings highlight an important aspect of social media: while it lacks the user base and consistency to directly reflect users' lives, it does reveal the idealized everyday life that so many visitors want to know about.