Strengthening Dracula tourism brand through cartographic approaches

ABSTRACT

During the last decades, the tourism market saw the growth of national and regional brands based on characters and places promoted through movies and TV series. One of the most notorious tourism brands based on fictional works is represented by Dracula. With a constantly expanding coverage on entertainment channels, Dracula became widely popular and strongly associated with Romania. However, its capitalization by national tourism actors lacks synergy and integration of spatial features. In this paper, we use an original cartographic approach combining the spatial distribution of Dracula attractions and online data regarding tourist behavior aimed to set up a decision-making toolkit for the enhancement of brand management. The results confirm the existence of a spatial pattern in the distribution and differentiation of Dracula attractions, which affects the overall tourist behavior and satisfaction. The paper provides several recommendations for national actors in order to upgrade the tourism management of Dracula's image.

KEYWORDS:

• Thematic maps
• Dracula
• tourism brand
• dark tourism
• online visitor reviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data used in this article is available upon request [corresponding author].

Author Contributions

All four authors contributed equally to the development of the framework and writing of this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Geography, Faculty of Geography and Geology, University Alexandru Ioan Cuza from Iasi.