AI-assisted content analysis of hotels’ visual social media communication during the pandemic: a case luxury hotel in Italy
This paper forms a part of a wider body of work investigating social media communication changes of luxury hotels in Italy, during and post COVID-19 pandemic. It reports on the initial findings of the analysis of visual content featured on Facebook feeds of a sample of 5-star hotel brands. The photo collection was conducted using Facepager between 1st of January and 18th November 2021. An AI-based image content analysis approach, with the use of Google Vision AI, was used to extract the most frequently ascribed labels from 2,439 photos collected over three consecutive year samples. Using NVivo software the content analysis of the ascribed labels was performed, focussing on the frequency of occurrences of the collected phrases. In total 1001 individual labels were identified as used to ascribe the photos. The focus of this preliminary paper is the top 30 labels, which show that the visual communication of the hotel brand is mainly focused on interior design (e.g. furniture, lighting, art) and the natural environment (e.g. plants, sky, wood, water), with the pandemic stimulating the use of the latter. The study contributes to the literature by reinforcing the importance of relative consistency in luxury brand communication even in turbulent times as revealed by the content analysis of AI-extracted visual content.