An Eye on Riyadh Tourist Season: Using Geo-tagged Snapchat Posts to Analyse Tourists Impression

Social media has changed how individuals interact and communicate with others. It has become one of the essential communication platforms as users share their thoughts, ideas, and daily activities. Individuals like to socialize at their attended events publicly. Snapchat is a perfect platform that allows sharing ephemeral life-events via video or photo. Recently, Snapchat released the ability to access web-based SnapMap, which offers a real-time heat map of all snaps posted to “Our Story.” This paper will present the use of geo-tagged Snapchat posts (snaps) that are published on Snapchat public stories (i.e., SnapMap) to analyze tourists' impressions of selected Riyadh seasonal events using spatial, temporal, thematic, and sentiment descriptors. The initial results suggest the high potential for Snapchat to be used as a platform for preforming tourist event analysis such as crowd behaviour analysis, tourist preferences analysis and impression analysis.