A Framework to Analyze Cultural Values in Online Tourism Visuals of European Destinations

Abstract

Images play a crucial role in inspiring and informing travelers throughout the tourism experience. Due to this, destination management/marketing organizations (DMOs) do their best to provide visually rich websites and mobile applications. Among the factors guiding online communication choices, cultural values influence the selection and use of website design and multimedia contents. While several strategies are available to measure cultural values offline and online, so far, no consistent framework has accounted for the visual style of cultural categories in the tourism domain, especially within the European context. Addressing this research gap, the aim of this article is to propose a framework for the visual analysis of cultural values in the context of European destinations, also discussing the relation among values, visual content and visual style. The final model results from the combination of existing theories of visual semiotics and cross-cultural communication with bottom-up data from the semiotic analysis of 95 pictures from UK and Portuguese DMO websites.