Exploring the potential of nightscape photography for tourism: Preliminary insights

Abstract

In the last few years, many rural destinations have emerged in Europe, leading to increasing competition. Given the tendency for destinations to begin diversifying their offerings into tourist activity at night, the presentation of night landscape photographs offers a totally new opportunity for tourism promotion campaigns. However, this new field of research requires some prudence, given the paucity of studies on the effects and emotions they evoke in tourists. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions and the emotions evoked by nightscape pictures based on the principles of environmental psychology, compared to daytime landscape preferences. It also aims to understand if the elements in daytime pictures, which turn a certain landscape appreciated, apply to nightscape pictures and consequently, how they can be used in tourism promotion and branding. An exploratory study was carried out based on photo-elicitation, demonstrating the benefits of the combined use of textual and pictorial data. Results show that elements that are key during the day are not the same at night, such as complexity and points of reference. On the contrary, the preferred nightscape is based on simple open spaces, where the human eye could prospect security. Further research is necessary to consolidate these findings.