Organic destination imagery and social media: Mapping tourism dynamics across China’s Greater Bay Area cities

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon Gunn’s formative concept of organic destination image this study proposes an application and extension in a contemporary regional context. Noting that the formation of destination image now emanates from tourists as well as from tourism businesses, the researchers use a prominent Chinese social media platform – the Red – to evaluate tourist/user generated content on the destination image of the ‘9 + 2’ Greater Bay Area cities in southern China (9 mainland cites plus Macao and Hong Kong SARs). The authors employed computer-aided lexical analysis on over 10,000 posts extracted from the Red. Four clusters of designative and prescriptive image are revealed. The study contributes to knowledge by applying big data analytics to study destination image from the tourist perspective (user-generated organic image), especially in a regional context. The insights offer prospective benefits to destination planners at local and regional levels by showing the merits of mobilizing tourism resources across multiple cities.

摘要

借鉴Gunn关于原始目的地形象的基础概念, 这项研究将其应用在当代的区域环境中。注意到目的地形象既来自游客又来自旅游企业, 研究人员评估了中国著名社交媒体平台——小红书上的游客/用户生成的内容。他们探讨了中国南部大湾区的 ‘9 + 2’ 个城市的目的地形象(大湾区由9个大陆城市和澳门, 香港特别行政区组成) 。作者对超过一万条帖子进行了电脑计算机辅助的词汇分析, 提出了四个设计性和规定性的形象群组。该研究通过将大数据分析应用于游客角度的目的地形象研究 (即用户生成的原始目的地形象), 特别是在区域性目的地研究中, 作出了贡献。该研究提出的见解展示了调动多个城市旅游资源的优点, 这有助于地方及区域层面的目的地规划。

KEYWORDS:

• Organic destination image
• destination image
• social media
• user-generated content
• big data analytics
• Greater Bay Area
• China

关键词:

• 原始目的地形象
• 目的地形象
• 社交媒体
• 用户生成的内容
• 大数据分析
• 大湾区
• 中国

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Weng Si (Clara) Lei

Weng Si Lei (Clara) is Assistant Professor at the Macao Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao, China. She received her PhD in International Business from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Prior stepping into the academia, Clara worked in the industries for some years and took part mostly in marketing and event management (E-mail: [email protected]).

Zhaoyu Chen

Zhaoyu Chen (Vicky) is Lecturer at the Macao Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao, China. She received her PhD in School of Hotel & Tourism Management from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China. Her research interests are cultural tourism, heritage conservation, experiencescape and smart city development (E-mail: [email protected]).

Xiaolin Zhou

Xiaolin Zhou (Eva) is PhD candidate in the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-informatics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China. She has various research experience in GIScience, location-based social networks and text mining (E-mail: [email protected]).

Brian King

Brian King is Head of Department of Recreation, Park & Tourism Sciences, Texas A&M University in United States. He has published extensively on tourism in the Asia-Pacific region. He is also the Joint Editor-in-Chief of Tourism, Culture and Communication (E-mail: [email protected]).