Understanding municipalities and visitors tourism perspectives: An AI-driven analysis of Instagram posts in Italian and French villages

In the digital tourism age, both cities and villages are being shaped by rapid societal and technological transformations that redefine how they interact with visitors. While these transformations are fluid in cities, driven by the necessity to integrate residents and visitors, they have also become central for villages that engage with specific forms of tourism, particularly slow and rural tourism. It requires villages to change communication methods using social media and digital tools to benefit from these new opportunities for interaction. Research on the interaction between villages and tourists through social media tools is still in its early stages and requires both (i) novel tools and (ii) insights to align visitors’ preferences and behaviours with villages’ communication strategies. To advance this discourse, this research note contributes to the advancement of visual and digital methodologies in tourism research by proposing a replicable framework based on artificial intelligence for visual content analysis, focusing on 33 rural villages in France and Italy to explore the dual communicative perspectives of visitors and municipalities. To do so, we developed and trained an artificial intelligence-based BOT named "AI DetectKeywords" which leverages DALL⋅E Image Generation technology to systematically analyse and categorize photographs. Our results reveal different nuances in the communication between the villages and the visitors, highlighting different perceptions and interactions in a context that can embrace two similar but distinct tourism paths (i.e., slow tourism and rural tourism). It also offers a useful guide for researchers, policymakers, and tourism communication managers to refine their communication strategies.