Exploring emotional aspects of travel concepts via travel photos based on contrastive language-image pretraining

Understanding travel concepts and their associated emotions is beneficial for promoting tourism destinations and attracting travelers seeking specific emotional experiences. However, few studies in tourism literature have explored the emotional aspects of travel concepts, likely due to the abstract nature of emotion, which makes capturing and analyzing emotions challenging. This paper introduces a novel method for the effective exploration of emotions associated with travel concepts through travel photos to address this gap. By leveraging a state-of-the-art computer vision technique, Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining, our method can uncover various travel concepts and their associated emotions. We demonstrate the method's effectiveness through a case study of Australia, analyzing 436,177 photos shared by 9457 users. The method and its findings are valuable for researchers and tourism managers, offering insights into the emotional aspects of travel concepts for use in tourism marketing and other applications. • A novel method for analyzing emotions associated with travel experiences through photos is proposed. • The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a case study focused on Australia. • Multiple emotions associated with various travel concepts are identified. • The emotional preferences of different groups of travelers are revealed. • The proposed method and findings can significantly enhance travel and tourism marketing strategies.