A lack of cross-cultural research has been identified regarding cultural tourism promotion on social media. Using the dimensions of Collectivism-Individualism, Power Distance, and High-Context vs. Low-Context communication, we content analyze cultural value differences in Instagram posts promoting cultural tourism -published by the national tourism organizations of Chile, Portugal, USA, and Netherlands. In addition, an automated content analysis is conducted using the software LIWC2015 to examine linguistic differences between collectivist and individualist destinations' posts. Findings show that cultural tourism promotion on Instagram differs across cultures, highlighting the importance of adapting online content when addressing culturally distant markets.

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The globalization of the tourism industry has been made possible thanks to ICTs. From a communication viewpoint, Internet does not know political borders, but still experiences linguistic and cultural ones. This situation requires that publishers provide both a linguistic and a cultural translation of their messages. Only caring for such a comprehensive “localization” will ensure being understandable and attractive for people with different cultural backgrounds. The chapter analyzes (1) the reasons why localization in tourism online communication is needed (with a focus on tourism destinations and cultural tourism); (2) the main needed activities to provide it. It also discusses (3) different practices and strategies (presenting a few cases), as well as (4) the issue of how much localization is needed, and when it may become counter-productive, making the destination too much similar to one's own experience at home.

Images play a crucial role in inspiring and informing travelers throughout the tourism experience. Due to this, destination management/marketing organizations (DMOs) do their best to provide visually rich websites and mobile applications. Among the factors guiding online communication choices, cultural values influence the selection and use of website design and multimedia contents. While several strategies are available to measure cultural values offline and online, so far, no consistent framework has accounted for the visual style of cultural categories in the tourism domain, especially within the European context. Addressing this research gap, the aim of this article is to propose a framework for the visual analysis of cultural values in the context of European destinations, also discussing the relation among values, visual content and visual style. The final model results from the combination of existing theories of visual semiotics and cross-cultural communication with bottom-up data from the semiotic analysis of 95 pictures from UK and Portuguese DMO websites.

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