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

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