Tourist gaze upon Bangkok: where exotism & modernism collide

2.1. Tourist gaze

Tourist gaze has been one of the highly explored concepts in tourism; built upon the concept of the medical gaze, the idea was introduced by British Sociologist, John Urry (see Urry, Citation1992, Citation2002). In the early iterations of gaze, Urry (Citation1992) argued that tourists generally gaze upon what is considered different from everyday life, as those that are seen as exotic (Shani et al., Citation2010), mysterious (Xiao & Mair, Citation2006) and extraordinary (Stone & Nyaupane, Citation2019). Scholars have agreed that tourist gaze was constructed upon and being mediated by tourism media (e.g. travel brochures), certain colonial discourses (Echtner & Prasad, Citation2003) and the institutionalization of tourism businesses (e.g. travel agents) (Wassler & Kirillova, Citation2019). Tourists exercise power when gazing at locals, regulating the relationship between gazers (tourists) and gazees (locals) as the ‘self’ and the exotic ‘other’ (Huang et al., Citation2017). Early scholars have addressed the elitist views of gazers and found some examples. In the study relating to Western marketing printed media (Echtner & Prasad, Citation2003), the authors suggested the view of the Western gazers heavily rely on the colonial perception, depicting the Western superior and the non-Western inferiority. The colonist binaries have been demonstrated in the work of Prasad (Citation2003) who suggested the predominant Western image and discourses between the West versus non-West, such as centre/periphery, civilized/primitive, developed/underdeveloped, and subject/object.

Various perspectives and different types of gazes were also formed and elaborated in the previous tourism studies (see Appendix A). Amongst many others, Caton and Santos (Citation2008) suggested the colonialist ideology influenced the dichotomy of gazes found in the photography yearbook of the SAS voyage of students visiting the countries in the Far East and North Africa. The authors proposed five gaze dichotomies (binaries) which comprised Traditional/modern dichotomy; Subject/object dichotomy; Master/servant dichotomy; Centre/periphery dichotomy; and Devious-lazy/moral-industrious dichotomy.

Critiques regarding the idea that tourists gaze at people and things that are ‘extraordinary and different from home’ become subjects of further discussions. As argued by Edensor (Citation2018), tourism is not separate from everyday life, and tourists’ practices ‘abound with their own habitual enactments’ (p. 61). This concept gives rise to the view that the tourist gaze is heterogeneous (Stone & Nyaupane, Citation2019). Huang et al. (Citation2017) investigated the second-generation immigrant Chinese VFR tourists living in the US and suggested that the VFR second-generation immigrant travellers hold a binary perception about their homeland and found China both exotic and familiar. Willis et al. (Citation2017) explored the gaze of business tourists upon the role of digital technology and suggested that the business travellers focus on ‘home’ rather than ‘away’ as digital technology has blurred the everyday life and exotic element of the destination. Larsen (Citation2008) suggested that the ‘family gaze’ revolves around the production of social relations and pinpointed that people on holiday desire to take personal and private holiday photos of their ‘loved ones’. Recently, Dinhopl and Gretzel (Citation2016) suggested selfie-taking as a new way of touristic looking, turning the tourist gaze towards oneself and making tourists become self-centeredness. Meanwhile, Höckert et al. (Citation2018) further investigated the ethical notion of the way locals have been gazed upon by tourists. A comprehensive summary of the different interactions of gazes can be found in Lin and Fu (Citation2021).

2.2. Tourist photography and the representation of gazes

Photography plays an important role in the imaginary construction and is an objectified form of the tourist gaze (Walsh et al., Citation2019). Photography allows one to focus on what one wishes to see, particularly on photogenic or iconic items (Zhang et al., Citation2021), either in a visual paradigm of gazing or in portraying it as a theatre of life (Larsen, Citation2008). According to Edensor (Citation2000 as cited in Nikjoo & Bakhshi, Citation2019), tourists with a camera resemble directors of theatre performances, in which photographed destinations are a ‘stage’ and the locals, tourists and their companions are the ‘actors’. Tourists capture their experiences through visual framing (Lo & McKercher, Citation2015) which could be influenced by the images circulating in one’s culture and predisposed by the travel promotional media (Albers & James, Citation1983). The circle of presentation (Jenkins, Citation2003) explains the situation in which visual images of a destination chosen for photography by a tourist are often selected and reproduced from the perspective of images which were already seen in the media. Tourists are often imposed to places or spaces of non-local preferences or the so-called tourist bubble (Belk & Yeh, Citation2011) where tourists are taken to the popular and familiar tourist places influenced prior to the visit and subsequently take photos of them. This process leads to the hermeneutic circle where images are recaptured and the resulting photographs displayed at home to show ‘their version of the images that they had seen originally before visiting the destination’ (Jenkins, Citation2003; Urry, Citation1992). As such, touristic gazing and what they have captured in the photos are not as free as they think.

Different tourist gazes involve particular processes by which the collective memory of a society is organized and reproduced (Urry & Larsen, Citation2011). Tourist photography is also part of documenting and producing an event, making it a concrete bodily performance of a tangible memory (Larsen, Citation2008) and often seen amongst the uniquely modern ways of producing life narratives and the way people can make sense of themselves and their relationships. Tourism in general and photography in particular also serve to organize one’s experience of time and space, by converting nature into a place for leisure (Urry, Citation1992) and showing peoples’ attempts to make their surroundings more meaningful, even if they fail to express their actual reality (Hall, Citation1982). Previous research also mentioned on the point that the camera demarcates the tourist from the local inhabitant who would not photograph the same things as a tourist (Belk & Yeh, Citation2011). Not only that gazing through tourist photography has the role of mirroring a pre-photographic reality, the photography could also construct a new reality to people (see family photography in Larsen, Citation2008).

2.3. Application of machine learning in the place and destination study

The emergence of social media platforms and the era of Big Data have stimulated research relating to places and destinations to another level. For those studies relating to places, the photo-sharing depositories can be used to generate interesting and unrevealed spatial patterns (Li et al., Citation2018) derived from the photos of places, cities or countries to provide other insights into the related fields. Previous research using the photo-sharing platforms, such as Flickr or Instagram, were conducted to determine certain unknown patterns in the domains of city image, destination images or the spatial movement of people within the selected spaces (also see Vu et al., Citation2015).

The recent research conducted by Li et al. (Citation2018) used density-based spatial clustering of photos, dissimilarity index, spatial scan statistic and location-based tag cloud to demonstrate the spatial patterns that locals and tourists could overlap in the urban spaces using photos from Flickr. Another research by Taecharungroj and Mathayomchan (Citation2020b) applied an ML algorithm to the Flickr photos to identify the city image dimensions (CIDs) of cities worldwide. Instagram photos are also used for the identification of a cluster of destination images; additionally, by combining semiotics and ML algorithm, the authors reveal tourists’ preferences and movement which are specific, previously blind spots and less promoted by marketers (Arefieva et al., Citation2021).

However, research using ML and photo repositories to investigate the tourist gaze remains limited. For this current research, we proposed that the available photo depository, such as Flickr would allow us to investigate the gaze patterns from gazers with different origins, providing a deeper insight into the nature and topics of gazes.

3.1. Photo retrieval and label detection

The first step was to collect photos of Bangkok from Flickr.com. Owing to the pervasiveness, breadth and popularity of the platform, recent research has used Flickr photos for various purposes (e.g. Ashkezari-Toussi et al., Citation2019). All photos from 2011 to 2020 that can be searched using the term ‘Bangkok’ were collected using the Flickr API with a Python script. All photos were screened to select photos that have coordinates within Bangkok. Finally, 295,303 photos remain for further analysis. This study used Google Cloud Vision AI, which helps analyse and extract labels from images. All of the photos were processed to detect labels. This study accumulated a total number of 8,566 unique labels.

3.2. Topic modelling (LDA)

The tourist gazes of Bangkok were extracted from the photos using LDA. LDA is a topic-modelling technique that assumes the existence of a hidden structure consisting of a set of topics in the whole corpus of photos (Tirunillai & Tellis, Citation2014). It helps identify the underlying topics from a large number of photos by using the co-occurrence of labels in those photos. To perform LDA, the authors first indicated the number of topics (gazes). As a result, 12 is the most suitable number of topics based on a local minimal point by Cao et al. (Citation2009)’s algorithm and a local maximal point according to Deveaud et al. (Citation2014) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Number of Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic results.

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Prior to performing LDA, hyperparameter (alpha and beta) tuning was conducted to improve the performance of topic modelling (Panichella, Citation2021). LDA was performed with 5 random starts and the best model was selected on the bases of the highest posterior likelihood (Tirunillai & Tellis, Citation2014). Then, the topics (gazes) were extracted, with each gaze containing 20 labels for interpretation and topic naming. Each gaze consisted of labels with varying degrees of relevance; the most relevant labels were displayed and used for topic naming. The LDA model also produces gamma values—a probability distribution over topics—of each photo. Each photo was assigned to its most probable gaze for further analysis.

3.3. Analyses of the tourist gazes

To analyse the gazes of tourists, photos were separated on the basis of the user’s region of residence (region henceforth). The region was specified on the basis of the user’s reported country of residence collected using a Python script. This study grouped countries of residence into 10 regions and an NA (not available) category. This study selected the top four regions for comparison: Thailand, Europe, Asia and North America. The proportions of photos in each gaze were compared across these four regions.

A spatial analysis was performed to illustrate the associations between user’s region and locations in Bangkok. In this research, analyses were performed on a sub-district level (so-called Kwaeng in Thai) because it is the smallest administrative unit of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA). To analyse the associations, we computed the odds ratios using the following formula: $\mathrm{O}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{i}{\mathrm{o}}_{ij}={\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{O}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{f}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{p}\mathrm{h}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{f}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{g}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{o}{\mathrm{n}}_i\mathrm{i}\mathrm{n}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{u}\mathrm{b}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{t}}_j}{\mathrm{O}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{f}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{p}\mathrm{h}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{f}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{g}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{o}{\mathrm{n}}_i\mathrm{o}\mathrm{u}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{u}\mathrm{b}\mathrm{d}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{t}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{t}}_j}.}$

3.4. Visual content analysis (VCA) of the tourist gaze

Photographs taken by international tourists were systematically selected for further VCA which is a systematic, observational and objective procedure for quantifying recorded audio-visual representation (Bell, Citation2001). The emphasis of VCA in this study is to investigate the dichotomy of gazes; photos from the five topics (gazes) were selected reflecting the sociological view of gazer–gazee dichotomies (Caton & Santos, Citation2008). In each selected topic, the combined 90 systematic–random photos were drawn from the three international tourist groups. The photos were selected on the bases of the gamma values—their likelihood of containing the gaze. Every 5th photo was taken until 30 photographs were collected from each tourist group, totalling 450 collected photos. The two researchers had agreed upon the definitions in each category (shown in Appendix B) before the VCA was separately conducted. The interrater reliability was carried out using Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient and produced an agreeable result of 0.812. We resolved the discrepancy issue and reached a consensus by discussing the divergent interpretation of photos.

4.1. Twelve gazes identified by LDA

As a response to objective 1, the results from LDA reveal that the underlying topics of the 295,303 photographs comprise 12 topics (gazes). LDA modelling presented the dominant or representative labels within each gaze (Table 1).

As photos are a record of the images the tourist gazed upon, Figure 3 illustrates the proportions of the 12 extracted gazes to the total number by the three groups of tourists (Europe, North America and Asia) and the local Thais. The grid displays the percentage of photos in each gaze to the total number of photos by users from the region. Results show distinct patterns of tourists and the locals to be discussed below.

Figure 3. Visual grid representing proportions of photos in each gaze to the total number of photos by region (%).

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4.2. Tourist gaze upon the city of Bangkok

4.2.1. Western tourist gazes

As a response to objective 2, the Western gazes are investigated. According to Figure 3, the European tourists and the North American tourists pose some similar weights of the photo topics, indicating the degree to which those components were gazed upon. The topics that share approximately a similar amount of gazes are (1) water, (2) interior, (3) temple, (4) vehicle, (5) people, (6) entertainment, (7) building and (8) street. Of all these gazes, ‘temple’ shares the largest number of photos by both groups (29%), indicating the interest in the heritage and architecture that project a cultural uniqueness of the East. Apart from the similarities, three topics represent gaze discrepancies namely, (1) air travel, (2) food and (3) plant. The photos about ‘air travel’ receive higher attention from the European tourists (5% vs 0%), whilst ‘food’ and ‘plant’ receive higher attention from the North American tourists (7% vs 4% and 8% vs 5%, respectively).

Spatial analyses were conducted to bring clarity to the geographical focus of the photos. The odd-ratio results (Figure 4) illustrate the sub-districts of Bangkok from which tourists from each region are more (or less) likely to take photos. The spatial analysis provides further insight into ‘tourist bubbles’, where tourists receive influences from the colonial discourses (Echtner & Prasad, Citation2003), construct the views of the destination, and choose to visit a destination as a representation of places. Figure 4 shows the spatial map of Bangkok representing the degree of photos taken by the European and North American tourists. Sub-districts (or Kwaengs henceforth) with darker shades imply the higher odd ratios of photos taken by tourists of a particular region, and yellow magnified rectangle represents the old-town areas and Kwaengs in the vicinities. Each Kwaeng was labelled by a letter denoting the most frequently found gaze. The majority of Kwaengs of both Western gazes were dominated by the ‘temple’ gazes (represented by the letter ‘t’) and many geographical locations of it were also concentrated in the same areas (Figures 4 and 5).

Figure 4. Map of Bangkok on the sub-district (Kwaengs) level by users from Europe and North America.

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Figure 5. Hotspot analysis of ‘Temple’ of the two Western tourist groups.

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Since most of the ‘temple’ photos were taken in the old-town and Central Bangkok areas, the hotspot analysis was conducted to delve deeper into these locations. Figure 5 illustrates that a large number of ‘temple’ photos are mainly taken in the famous tourism spots, to name a few, The Grand Palace, Wat Pho, Wat Arun, and the Marble Temple.

The combination of the highest photo proportion of ‘temple’ in the visual grid (Figure 3), the photo density (Figure 4), and the hotspot analysis (Figure 5) leads to concrete evidence that there has always been a persistent and strong influence of the Western imagery in both tourist groups when they visit Bangkok. The prominent areas in Figure 5 (highlighted in yellow to amber colours) indicate the tourism spots where the ‘temple’ photos were highly taken. The comparative hotspots reveal that the Western tourists are generally stereotypical and have dominant focuses on the extraordinary facets of destinations labelled as popular or iconic attractions. These items appear in the travel media, and by being repeatedly photographed by tourists, this whole process amplifies and reifies the exotic and instant-authentic cultures of the city (Edensor, Citation2018), and subsequently completes the hermeneutic circle (Jenkins, Citation2003).

Despite the similarity, the spatial patterns of the ‘temple’ gaze are not entirely the same for the two Western groups. Although the European and the North American tourists share some common touristic spots, more pervasive and frequent patterns are found in the former- than the latter- tourist groups. The hotspot analysis reveals that the European tourists wander around and visit the less famous temples whilst the North Americans remain in the ‘tourist bubble’ of Central Bangkok.

By contrast, the topics that the two groups cast different gazes upon (e.g. air travel, food) clearly show dissimilar spatial tourist spaces (Figure 4). The European tourists have more interest in air transport, and the two Kwaengs that show high photo density (in dark-blue colour) are locations where the two international airports locate (Figure 4). The same degree is not found in North American tourists, as they capture more ‘food’ photos (Figure 3).

4.2.2. Asian tourist gaze and the local-resident gaze

According to Figure 3, four topics that the Asian tourists distinctly cast their gaze are (1) interior, (2) food, (3) entertainment and (4) street. Despite receiving the highest proportion of photos (18%), their ‘temple’ gazes show a much less proportion than those of Western tourists. Many Asian tourists may not find the temples highly exciting due to the familiarity in culture and a closer cultural background. The Asian tourists took more photos of ‘interior’ (17%), ‘streets’ (12%), ‘food’ (11%), and ‘entertainment’ (6%) representing their higher interest in aspects relating to tourism activities, and tangible facets of Bangkok.

Regarding the touristic spaces (Figure 6), the odd ratios of the photos taken by the Asian tourists in the magnified areas of old-town Bangkok are lower than those of the European and the North American groups (indicated by lighter-shaded Kwaengs). By contrast, the odd ratios of Asian tourists in the Central Business Districts (CBD) are evidently higher; many Kwaengs in such an area have ‘interior (i)’ as the most prominent gaze by this group of tourists. The results reveal that not only the gaze proportions of the Asian tourists are generally different from the two Western groups, but the density of gazes upon each Kwaeng, along with their dominant locations, are also different.

Figure 6. Map of Bangkok in the sub-district (Kwaeng) level: Red—the Asian; Gray—the Local.

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In most gazes, the local residents took much fewer photos than the international tourist groups, apart from the following gazes: (1) ceremony (33%), (2) people (17%), and (3) entertainment (13%). The photographic spaces for the Thais are different from those of the international tourists. Photos are heavily taken in Kwaengs that are scattered around Bangkok. The density of the photos in the magnified tourist bubble spaces (i.e. old-town) appears much lower than the Western groups. The photo investigation reveals that most photographs about the ceremony portray the photo shootings for weddings or different types of events, depicting that photo shooters could be hired photographers. As the tourists and locals generally do not share similar interests nor photograph the same things (Belk & Yeh, Citation2011), the demarcation between the international tourists and the local residents is evidenced in Bangkok.

4.3. Tourist gazes: sociological aspect of gazer and gazee

As a response to the third objective, the researchers employed a sociological view of the gaze dichotomy to investigate the photography of Bangkok. The VCA reveals the denotation (explicit components) and connotation (deeper meanings) regarding potential dichotomies addressed by earlier scholars (Caton & Santos, Citation2008; Prasad, Citation2003). The combined 90 systematic–random photos of each chosen gaze were drawn from the three tourist groups to investigate the dominant gaze dichotomies. The selected photos come from the gazes that show a proportion of photos from 10 percent and above, namely, (1) interior, (2) temple, (3) building and (4) street. However, the topic on ‘people’ is specifically added for the VCA due to its human elements that can portray the nature of gazers and gazees. The dominant and related dichotomies derived from these photos include traditional versus modern; subject versus object and centre versus periphery. The VCA results are shown in Appendices C and D.

4.3.1. Traditional versus modern views

Results show that the traditional gaze on Bangkok is strongly evidenced in ‘temple’ (Figures 7), whilst a large portion of modern gazes have been witnessed in ‘building’ (Figure 9). Many photos in the ‘street’ gaze also represent ways of local life (Figure 8). Both ‘temple’ and ‘street’ gazes can represent traditional/local aspects of the gaze projecting the features of cultural and some peculiar facets of Bangkok. All the ‘temple’ photos of the tourist groups are relating to cultural and historical architectures. The ‘street’ gaze reflects several local and eccentric elements. In most photos under ‘street’, the snapshot of local vendors selling food and interesting oddments have often been the focus of the gazers. The components in and the magnitude of the photos reveal that tourists are interested in visually consuming these cultural elements and presented them as representative points or objects of the visit (Caton & Santos, Citation2008).

Figure 7. Photo samples of ‘temple’ from the North American (left) and the European tourists (right). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/88827093@N00/46615898945; https://www.flickr.com/photos/37803129@N00/5407046035.

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Figure 8. Photo samples of ‘street’ from the North American (Left) and the European tourists (Right). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/27572989@N02/21619655192; https://www.flickr.com/photos/77823393@N03/26239257258.

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Figure 9. Photo samples of ‘building’ from the North American (Left) and the European tourists (Right). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/66458073@N00/48952922473; https://www.flickr.com/photos/9384523@N05/7469747842.

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Nevertheless, within the similarity, different photo foci and tourism space are also found amongst the tourist groups. In the ‘street’ topic, the photo components of the Asian and European tourists largely portray the touristic markets and popular touristic areas (e.g. China town and tourist streets), whilst the photos from the North American tourists reflect the local streets and markets. In the ‘temple’ topic, the three tourist groups have different foci when they captured photos of temple elements. The North Americans took more photos of The Grand Palace and the Indian Giant Statues, whilst the European and the Asian tourists took more photos of the pagodas. Photographs taken from ‘street’ and ‘temple’ reveal that within similar gazes, different perceived foci and spatial patterns of different tourist groups do exist.

Moreover, the photos that represent ‘building’ reveal the modernization of the gazes by the three tourist groups. A large number of the ‘building’ photos are skyscrapers and cityscapes reinforcing the facet of Bangkok as a modern city of Asia. However, nearly half of the North American photos also illustrate the old buildings and traditional Bangkokian houses, whereas the European tourists have them in a much fewer portion. The photos of Asian tourists conversely represent the modern and cosmopolitan aspects, indicating different foci of the Asian and the European tourists from the North Americans in this aspect.

Furthermore, an assortment of photos has been collected from the ‘interior’ gaze. On the one hand, most of the Asian tourists still mainly portray the modernization as most of the photos were taken in hotel rooms with contemporary decoration. The combined photos of the Asian tourists from ‘building’ and ‘interior’ topics represent strongly the urban-living imagery and the modern-objectified cityscape as a strong gaze of this group. On the other hand, the two Western tourist groups show a mixture of the traditional and modern gaze combinations. Apart from the photos of the contemporary and modern hotel interiors and modern arts, nearly half of the photos taken by these Western groups represent local-style decoration, the traditional paintings or temple interiors. The exoticism and peculiarity remain a crucial part of their gazes regardless of topics or tourism components deemed the objects of their gaze.

Based on the traditional versus modern dichotomy and in combination with the visual grid, we synopsize that for the Western tourists, travelling to the Fareast destinations such as Bangkok still heavily involves the anticipative images of exotic constructionism, of instant authenticity (Lin & Fu, Citation2021) and peculiar elements (Caton & Santos, Citation2008; Lin & Fu, Citation2021) rather than perceiving the place as the contemporary city of Asia, given that the former anticipative images are strongly influenced by the Western discourses, imagery and tourism media. The difference is mainly found in the Asian tourists in which the gazes at Bangkok are more balanced between the traditional and the modern facets. Apart from having an interest in cultural architectures (‘temple’), they also seek to visually and physically consume the modernization of the city. This notion supports the common debate on the Western discourse of ‘the gaze on exoticism’ which continues to predominantly exist despite the ubiquity of international travels and globalization (Greig, Citation2002).

5.1. Theoretical contribution

Although the tourist-gaze study is not new, the current stage of research still lacks insights, especially when a large number of photographs were unavailable before to provide clarity on a common gaze pattern. Through the combination of methods, the study contributes to the literature in two important ways. Firstly, by applying Big Data and ML, the study is able to use rich data to classify the gazes and to identify similarities and differences between the Western gaze, Asian and locals, together with their spatial characteristics when they visited Bangkok. Our findings are able to elaborate on those common Western colonial views on traditional exoticism together with the modern views towards Bangkok. Based on such findings, this research supports the notion that stereotypical gazes strongly dominate and exist amongst the key Western tourists, which have been socially and strongly constructed on the basis of the representative power of media and social dialogue (Echtner & Prasad, Citation2003). When the Western tourists cast their gazes upon Bangkok, the collective and spectatorial gazes predominantly represent unique cultural icons, which are found as a common promotional item in the Western tourism media (e.g. Thai temples and the Grand Palace). Specific eccentric views are put on the locals, their way of life and the interior art pieces. Their photographs complete the circle of representation (Jenkins, Citation2003) and support the point that the ‘uniqueness’ or ‘otherness’ of places often functions as a magnet of camera lenses (Höckert et al., Citation2018) despite other modern elements that the city has offered. By contrast, the different foci of the gaze and the balance between the traditional and modern views are found more in the Asian tourists. The findings reflect disparate foci of preferences of these tourist groups, explicably influenced by cultural norms, values and representative tourism discourses of each society.

Secondly, Wassler and Kirillova (Citation2019) raised an important notion that the objectifying power of the gaze is detrimental to an authentic relationship between a host and a guest, as the gaze ‘alienates, stereotypes, objectifies and ultimately, de-humanizes the gazer and the gazee’ (p. 124). This current research provides empirical support on their observation. The objectification and alienization that the gazer gave to the gazee are witnessed in a number of photos. The long-embedded viewpoints of the superior position still rooted in the Western acuities, despite the global attempts to reinforce cultural and geographical closeness from globalization and blurring regional and intercontinental boundaries (Greig, Citation2002). This theoretical support is important as it reflects the existing psychological and distal gaps between the gazer and gazee, drawn out from photography as a key medium that represents visual tourism consumption and the interpretation of host–guest relation via gaze. However, the study also implies the limitation and the exploitation of photographs and their ability to represent the true nature of tourist and local interaction and the limited host–guest relation in the ‘city’ focus which may be found differently in the ‘countryside’ nor that the photography captured from the city can solely represent the accumulative tourist experience at a destination.

5.2. Managerial contribution

This research provides a managerial contribution to tourism-route design and the space planning between residents and tourists.

Firstly, the finding confirms the importance of tourist segmentation and reveals that not all the tourist groups share similar tourist spaces, route patterns and foci. Route design on the favourable tourism spaces that cater to the interest of each tourist group is recommended as the socio-cultural influences have potentially affected different interests of these tourist groups. For instance, more tourism activities and experiences that indicate novelty seeking and specific interests can be incorporated into the Western tourist groups, such as the aspect of air transport, Thai boxing for the European tourists and exotic ways of life and greenery for the North American tourists when they visit Bangkok. The routes of tourism sites, involving food tourism and activities that promote family and friend’s boundary, could be designed to cater to the Asian tourist groups.

Secondly, as locals and tourists do not generally share the same space and similar interests when it comes to utilizing the city’s resources, this phenomenon could be amongst the reasons why the gap in host–guest relations does exist. City planners can create more of the so-called, public spaces, which are places that give a sense of openness, cultural diversity, a space created for ‘people’ so that locals and tourists have a chance to forget their ‘tourist’ and ‘local’ labels and allow mingling or being absorbed in leisure activities on a deeper level. The notion supports the meaning of a ‘cosmopolitan city’ where tolerance of cultural diversity and the willingness to engage others are fundamental qualities (Young et al., Citation2006). This possibility can happen when the city planners and authorities have a common aim of promoting the public life of the city where the labelling of certain roles is reduced and human dimension is its main priority.

Finally, this research contains some limitations. The use of one photo repository on a single destination does not allow for generalization on the topics of gazes and the pattern of spatial gazing spaces. The application of using photography as a proxy for tourist gaze certainly poses questions of whether to what extent this tourism visual consumption can reflect the real tourism experience. As implied in the photographs, one could never know whether any genuine or friendly dialogues would take place between the host and the tourists after the photos were taken and whether a similar ‘host–guest alienation’ is also found in the countryside context. Moreover, by perceiving a visitor with a camera as a ‘tourist’, this label may psychologically self-direct a person towards the act of alienation and make him or her objectify the gaze which consequently amplifies the disconnection between tourists and locals. Hence, further thoughts and research on the new paradigm of humanizing the role of ‘tourist’ by incorporating the studies of city and space planning into the tourism research arena will be a promising and timely research agenda.