Travel Guides for Creative Tourists, Powered by Geotagged Social Media

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.