TOURISM MANAGEMENT IN A PANDEMIC CRISIS – HOW TO MAKE A CITY BRAND OUT OF INSTAGRAM SPOTS

We live in a time when the online presence is much better observed than the real presence. To this way of life is added the pandemic that has strongly affected the lives of all of us and has restricted, more or less, our free movement and freedom to be tourists. From the establishment of social platforms until recently, the focus has been on the individual and less on products, services or cities. Currently, a company or city does not exist if it is not found by users of social platforms within the applications. A city becomes attractive from a tourist point of view if it has "Instagramable" places. These places can be defined as areas inside the city that have certain characteristics that attract the tourist and make him take photos and upload those pictures on social networks. These areas are called "Instagram spots" and represent a new type of city way of marketing. We can see, in specialized practice, cities that did not exist a few years ago, but due to the increase in the number of users on Instagram, the increase in the number of photo posts in that city and a much larger activity due to the pandemic, they have become real tourist attractions. Through this paper we wanted to highlight this concept of "Instagram spots" and the importance it has in achieving the brand of a city. For this we will conduct a research based on a questionnaire applied to a number of 370 people active on social networks, but also an analysis of things that can be done using Instagram and we will try to establish a link between social networking users and the attractiveness of a Town. We will also try to determine the impact that these "Instagram spots" have on the cities where they exist and we will try to establish a link between the total number of these places, the number of tourists and the brand of the city.