by: Roman Egger

In my research seminar “eTourism Research” at our study program “Innovation and Management in Tourism” at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences I always manage to write a publishable paper with a group. Together with my students Diana Hauser, Antonia Leopold, Hasini Ganewita, and Leonie Herrgesell we published the paper “Aesthetic perception analysis of destination pictures using #beautifuldestinations on Instagram” in the “Journal of Destination Marketing & Management”.

In this article are focusing on the perception of aesthetics of destination pictures using machine learning to cluster photos from Instagram with the hashtag “beautifuldestination” according to their themes (Mountain, Architecture, Coast, City, Nature, Bird-Eye View etc.) and then analyzed them with regard to the relevance of design elements such as color, light, line, angle of view and focus. We used machine learning to cluster photos from Instagram with the hashtag “beautifuldestination” according to their themes (Mountain, Architecture, Coast, City, Nature, Bird-Eye View etc.) and then analyzed them with regard to the relevance of design elements such as color, light, line, angle of view and focus.

The results clearly show that different design elements are relevant to the perception of aesthetics for different topics.

The paper is available via open access – download and read the full paper here