Impact of tourism destination image on perceived usefulness of online reviews: Psychological distance effect and two methodologies

Abstract

This study aimed to empirically verify the impact of tourism destination image on perceived usefulness from the perspective of construal-level theory. It also attempted to compare the results of the survey and data mining techniques regarding methodology. An online survey was initially conducted, and statistical analysis was performed using the R program. Concurrently, 25,952 reviews from TripAdvisor were gathered using a web crawler, Octoparse, and analyzed using the Tidyverse approach. The results indicated that, in the probabilistically distant group, affective destination image had a significant effect on perceived usefulness, whereas cognitive image did not affect perceived usefulness. Contrastingly, in the probabilistically close group, cognitive images had a stronger effect on perceived usefulness than affective images. Both the influential relationship between affective and cognitive images and the comparison of the two research methods were partially supported. These findings have theoretical and practical implications.