Online tourism destination image: components, information sources, and incongruence

ABSTRACT

This article considers the three modes of signification of images (i.e. designative, appraisive, and prescriptive) to understand incongruences between different image formation agents. Quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to compare texts (208,348 words) and pictures (4,990) from four sources (DMO, agencies, guides, and blogs) of images about Barcelona. The results explained incongruences between sources. Blogs and agencies tend to offer more images with appraisive meaning than other sources. Guides and blogs tend to offer more prescriptive images of the destination. This study emphasizes that the designative, appraisive, and prescriptive components are valuable conceptualizations to study tourism destination image.

KEYWORDS:

• Online destination image
• modes of signification
• designative, appraisive, and prescriptive meaning
• image incongruence
• image components
• information sources
• text and pictures
• Chinese outbound tourism
• Barcelona
• Europe

Acknowledgements

Part of the work described in this article was completed while the first author (a) was a visiting scholar at Sun Yat-sen University (P. R. China). We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain) [EST17/00474,FPU014/03436]; National Natural Science Foundation of China (P. R. China) [41871139].