Tourists themselves have been neglected in studies that address
the conceptualisation of the tourism destination; they tend to be
taken for granted. Pearce (2014) states that tourists and residents
are less frequently included as actors involved in the destination
compared to tourism firms or local authorities. However, due to the
availability of new digital data sources it is now possible to measure
the tourist composition in time and space more precisely. For
instance, geo-tagged photographs from the photo-sharing website
Flickr (Girardin et al., 2008) or geo-located Twitter messages
(Hawelka et al., 2014) can be used to segment tourists based on
their country of residence and their spatiotemporal movement
patterns.