The dispersal of the travel Bucket List on Instagram

Abstract

The concept of the travel 'Bucket List' has garnered significant levels of attention within popular culture, but has only recently been touched on within academic tourism research. The rise of 'Bucket List tourism' links to a range of challenges and opportunities for the tourism industry, including tourism marketing and overtourism. This study uses Instagram geolocation data gained through Instagram's public API to explore Bucket List destinations based on the use of the hashtag 'bucketlist'. Geolocation data was collected from 954,190 Instagram posts tagged with #bucketlist, and mapped. Mapping of the data into a heatmap indicates that while popular tourist destinations including New York City, London and Western Europe feature on people's bucket lists, Bucket List destinations extend beyond these highly visited tourist destinations around the globe. For some countries, there is a much higher density of #bucketlist posts than comparative visitation, for example Reunion, Mauritius and New Zealand.