Ninth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Research on tourism crowding is gaining momentum in the current literature as more and more destinations and monuments face carrying capacity issues nowadays. However, the crowding phenomenon is still poorly understood, as studies have mostly relied on quantitative survey-based methodologies, which have provided inconclusive results about crowding’s impact on tourists’ satisfaction, emotions, and behaviour. Hence, to extend the current body of literature on tourism crowding perceptions, the study leveraged an underexploited source of data: tourists’ social media posts on destination crowding. The study content analysed 300 posts published on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok containing the #crowded or its derivatives in one of the most visited European destinations: the city of Istanbul. The research set out to explore how tourists describe their crowding perceptions on social media by answering the following questions: (i) how is the perceived crowding represented visually?; (ii) how do visitors express the perceived crowding in the posts’ texts?; (iii) what types of crowding-related emotions are manifested? The visual analysis of the posts revealed four different ways of representing the experienced crowding: posing in front of/without the crowd, showing only the crowd and a view without it. As for the textual analysis, visitors used various figures of speech when mentioning crowding such as irony, sarcasm, palilogy and emphasis, apart from a wide range of positively-valenced emojis and travel-related hashtags. As for the emotions associated with crowding, a wide variety of emotions was found ranging from enjoyment, excitement, fascination, and love, to annoyance, frustration, shock and neutrality.