Tourism products’ variety engenders a correspondingly large number of approaches to their promotion. One popular angle for promotion, applicable in a handful of cities, draws on the destination’s imperial heritage. However, the patterns of using the imperial theme for tourism marketing vary in different capitals. This study is the first in a larger project aiming to study the former imperial capitals (St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Berlin, and Vienna). Our overall goal is to understand, first, how city representatives and travel agencies narrate the “imperial” past and turn it into a competitive advantage for the city, and second, how tourists react to such narratives. To collect and analyse the data, web scraping and text mining techniques are used. In this article, the first results of our study using the case of St. Petersburg are presented.

Key words: imperial capitals, semantic analysis, digital footprint analysis