Instagram is a popular social media platform. Its ability to convey feelings through photographs has become a valuable communication tool for tourism destination branding. The cases of two destinations in Southern Europe provide an understanding of how Instagram can be used to promote a destination’s image by Destination Management Organizations (DMOs). For this purpose, a content analysis is carried out, first of the official Instagram accounts of Algarve (Portugal) and Costa del Sol (Spain), and then of the most popular hashtags related to them, showing User-Generated Content (UGC) from the points of view of both destination managers and tourists. The results show that Instagram is a strategic social media platform for enhancing the brand image by engaging customers. Destinations seize content generated by tourists; therefore, the hermeneutic circle of representation is inverted, as photos taken by tourists aim to reproduce the perceived image of a destination and motivate tourists to capture their experiences with the best picture. Additionally, it is worth highlighting, as a main finding, the role of sustainability as a key factor in UGC for DMOs and for Instagram users. This research provides valuable information about designing promotion strategies for DMOs, in order to understand the potential of Instagram in building a destination’s image and inspiring tourism through images.

COVID-19 has changed our lives forever. The world we knew until now has been transformed and nowadays we live in a completely new scenario in a perpetual restructuring transition, in which the way we live, relate, and communicate with others has been altered permanently. Within this context, risk communication is playing a decisive role when informing, transmitting, and channeling the flow of information in society. COVID-19 has posed a real pandemic risk management challenge in terms of impact, preparedness, response, and mitigation by governments, health organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mass media, and stakeholders. In this study, we monitored the digital ecosystems during March and April 2020, and we obtained a sample of 106,261 communications through the analysis of APIs and Web Scraping techniques. This study examines how social media has affected risk communication in uncertain contexts and its impact on the emotions and sentiments derived from the semantic analysis in Spanish society during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the last decade, the advertising industry has experienced a quantum leap, powered by recent advances in neuroscience, a large investment in artificial intelligence, and a high degree of consumer expertise. Within this context, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and emotion understanding bring us closer to one of the most sought-after objectives of advertising: to offer relevant ads at scale. The importance of studies about opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and emotion understanding in advertising has been rising exponentially over the last years. The peak of this new situation has been the interest of the research community in studying the relationship between such innovations and the spread of smart and contextual advertising. This article analyzes those works that address the relationship between sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and emotion understanding in advertising. The main objective is to clarify the current state of these studies, explore issues, methods, findings, themes, and gaps as well as to define their significance within the current convergence advertising research scenario. To reach such objectives, a bibliometric analysis was conducted, retrieving and analyzing 919 research works published between 2010 and 2019 based on results from Web of Science (WoS).

Purpose: There is widespread agreement that the tourism sector should address the issue of sustainability. The purpose of this study is to analyze the digital accessibility of the cities awarded as European Capitals of Smart Tourism for their innovative, accessible and sustainable practices by the European Commission. Design/methodology/approach: An analysis of the digital level of accessibility of 50 uniform resource locator (URL) of European cities was undertaken. The analysis followed the international evaluation requirements of the World Wide Web (W3C). Findings: The results show that none of the official Web pages analyzed obtained 100% in relation to the digital accessibility requirements. The main factors that pose barriers to communication and interaction were identified. Practical implications: The paper encourages smart tourism destinations to overcome the challenge of matching both dimensions of accessibility to obtain barrier-free information to ensure cities are inclusive and sustainable in line with Agenda 2030 (sustainable development goal [SDG] 11). Originality/value: The concept of tourism for all receives special attention in the sector, and this notion is reflected in the UN SDGs. However, accessibility has not been extensively analyzed in relation to the cohesion between the digital and the physical dimension. Tourism research tends to focus on accessible experiences within destinations. This paper introduces a new insight into the key issue of digital accessibility, which can promote destination choice and influence the tourism experience.

This paper shows the effects of training entrepreneurial competences on employability in higher education. It identifies teaching methods that are more effective in order to improve entrepreneurial competences. These are hackathon, team building, role play, and practical cases with entrepreneurs at a Spanish university. In contrast to the methods shown in previous literature, a mixed-method is proposed. Firstly, a qualitative technique based on three focus groups with the participation of lecturers, students, and entrepreneurs are used. Additionally, a regression analysis seeks links between entrepreneurial intention and employability with entrepreneurial competences with 329 students. The findings show the direct effect on skills appreciated in companies, using collaborative and practical activities focusing on competency perspective. This research work provides a new approach to training entrepreneurial competences that demonstrates the main role of Open Innovation enhancing the main stakeholders’ motivation and improving their skills. Useful information is provided to design the academic syllabuses and improve the level of employability of university graduates.

This research aimed to provide a more informed and systematic basis on which to develop the positioning strategy in social media due to the interactive capacity and influence that social media has in the success of tourist destinations. In particular, we investigated the role of stakeholders. We carried out an exploratory study using a mixed method which included interviews and an analysis of the activity conducted on the official social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) of the Spanish regions of Andalusia, Catalonia, and Valencia. The findings provide insight into how tourist destinations promote their image through the use of social media. Social media was found to be a strategic platform for enhancing brand image and achieving tourist engagement. Additionally, the role of stakeholders in supporting and facilitating the image destination strategy is worth highlighting. This study shows that the results achieved by social media can be improved by identifying all stakeholders and defining a content generation strategy by integrating and adding value.