Quo Vadis Homo Turisticus? Towards a Picture-based Tourist Profiler

The World Wide Web has become an important source of information for tourists planning their vacation. So, destination recommendation systems supporting users in their decision making process by suggesting suitable holiday destinations or packages based on user profiles are a vivid area of research. Considering the complex and often tedious task to obtain such profiles we are exploring a new direction to manufacture user profiles. Having in mind that a picture paints a thousand words we conducted an online survey that allows investigating the relationship between tourism-related photographs and tourist types. In a nutshell, our findings show a significant relationship between different tourist types and the preference for particular visual impressions conveyed by photographs. Thus, tourist types can be determined by representative photos without necessarily requesting users to provide additional information.