Browsing by Subject "Luontomatkailu"

The direct economic impacts of the global tourism industry account for 4 % of global GDP and 8 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. The industry is in transformation caused by climate change, political instability and rapid technological development. In addition, the relationship between biodiversity conservation and tourism as well as the growing popularity are considered megatrends impacting the sector. Traditional mass tourism destinations, such as the Canary Islands, may start seeing new kinds of visitors, if traveling to exotic destinations becomes difficult as a result of these transformations. Understanding transformations affecting tourism requires information about tourists’ mobilities, interests and preferences. However, traditional data collection methods may not necessarily be suited for studying quickly changing tourism. The need for Information about visitations to natural and protected areas is especially high, as traditional tourism indicators, such as flights and accommodation statistics do not tell where the tourists spend time. Social media data may enable production of new kind of knowledge and studying nature-based tourism in a new way. In this thesis, I intent to assess the role of nature in tourism in the Canary Islands, Spain using data from the photo-sharing platform Flickr. First, I compare the spatiotemporal patterns of Flickr data against official data about tourism flows to confirm the feasibility of Flickr as a data source in the Canary Islands context. I then try to understand the importance of nature visitations and differences in nature visitation patterns between visitors from different countries. Finally, I turn to analyse contents of the images to see what kinds of nature-related topics are important for each group, making use of a deep learning and cluster detection algorithms. I verify the results of my empirical analysis with data collected through interviewing experts familiar with Canary Islands tourism. The results of my research show that Flickr reflects Canary Islands tourism patterns moderately well, and that it can be used to produce information about differences in nature visitation patterns. Protected areas are shown to be important and central for Canary Islands tourism, but differences in interest toward these areas between groups are notable. Results of the content analyses show that while differences between groups exist, both nature-related content and photos of humans are important in content posted from PAs. Verification data collected through expert interviews shows that the observed differences between groups correspond to the experts’ perceptions about differences between different groups. The findings of my thesis demonstrate the importance of nature and protected areas in Canary Islands tourism and confirm earlier knowledge about the use of Flickr in studying nature visitations. The results may inform future research in the Canary Islands. More broadly, they provide information about the feasibility and limitations of the use of social media data for nature-based tourism research.