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Tourists are increasingly using drones on vacation, but how they use them and the nature of the videos that they produce are not well understood. Conceptual advances in the study of tourist videography have produced a new model of these practices which is applied here to explain the nature of tourist videography with drones. An international sample of 351 vacation drone videos was subjected to content analysis, and an analysis of their metadata. The results show a significant variation in the content, technological and social practice of production of vacation drone videos depending on the type of video creator and, therefore, empirically validate and expand extant knowledge of drone videography as an emerging visual practice in tourism contexts. The findings establish that analysing the videos from the perspective of videography generates insights that are of value to destination management organizations and tourist businesses. We conclude that destination management organizations should see vacation drone videos as a new type of user-generated content for their destinations, as well as a potential source of innovative marketing ideas, and that they should engage more proactively with vacation drone videographers to maximise the impact of this opportunity. • Vacation drone videos are new type of user-generated content used for innovative destination marketing. • Content analysis of vacation drone videos supported by analysis of metadata. • The social dimension of tourism drone videos plays a more important role than the technological dimension. • Tourists and influencers, as drone vacation video creators, are more oriented to self-promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]