Journal of Destination Marketing & Management最新文献

While emojis serve as a proxy of emotion in digital environments and pave the way for new epistemological viewpoints in destination marketing, certain symbols fail to receive equal attention. This study explores the sentiment of emojis across social media posts featuring different destination characteristics and their impact on engagement. By employing topic modelling and permutation feature importance, the findings revealed 21 topics based on diverse tourism contexts and the relative importance of different emoji types in predicting engagement. Moreover, in addition to bridging semiotics, data science, and tourism, this research also provides a deeper understanding of leveraging visual semiotics through their embedded sentiment.

Virtual streamer has been utilized in the field of destination marketing where it has gained considerable success. This study develops an emotional richness–streamer attractiveness–parasocial relationship (PSR)–destination attractiveness–visit intention framework to explain the effect of virtual streamers on destination visitation based on image transfer theory. A total of 400 valid responses were collected through a questionnaire and then analysed with partial least squares structural equation modelling. The results indicate that the emotional richness of virtual streamers increases the viewer's perception of the streamer's attractiveness. In turn, such attractiveness could transfer to the destination through the mediation of the PSR, which further arouses visit intention. Moreover, the results reveal the moderating effects of streamer type (AI vs. non-AI) and streamer–viewer gender congruity. This study not only contributes to the live-streaming and destination marketing literature but also offers several useful suggestions for practitioners.

The concept of the peri-urban has been used to explore the dynamics of transition at the urban-rural interface, which has clarified the specific and diverse transitions taking place in these areas. However, research still offers little insight into tourism transitions in peri-urban areas that aim to use tourism as a catalyst for development. This paper addresses this gap with an in-depth study of tourism transitions in such a Danish peri-urban region. The analysis is based on observation, interview and documentary data collected over three years in one macro-case region and two micro-case destinations within that region. Drawing on the concept of robust action, the paper seeks a better understanding of what is termed complex challenges, associated with tourism transitions, and how specific destination development efforts can mitigate these. Four such challenges are identified relating to a lack of respectively investment, star attractions, access and accommodation. The two micro-cases illustrate how destinations can address such complex challenges through what we term robust destination development. The paper also develops a robust destination development framework and confirms its utility in a peri-urban tourism context. This framework enables destinations to cope with complex challenges and researchers to understand how they may do so.

Tourist attractions are the most vital elements in the tourism industry system and are central to a destination's appeal. Despite the considerable research interest in tourist attractions and their experiential offerings, there is a limited empirical foundation and theoretical underpinning addressing the optimal balance between constructability and tourist experience during attraction development, which is a critical concern in industrial practice. This study contributes to the literature by presenting a comprehensive approach grounded in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods to select tourist attraction construction plans and testing the effectiveness of this approach. We employ the Gini coefficient to represent the degree of equilibrium between constructability and tourist experience, and adopt the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) to evaluate and rank the alternative plans. This work provides theoretical and practical implications for the successful planning and construction of tourist attractions.

Tourists play an important role in shaping the destination image by posting their experiences on visual and audio-visual channels. Thus, it is increasingly important for a successful destination marketing strategy that destination managers know how their destination is perceived and whether this is aligned with the image they project. This comparative content analysis evaluates the potential gap between the projected and perceived destination image for the Lake Lucerne Region in Switzerland on Instagram.

From a database of over 10,000 posts, this study takes a closer look at 300 randomly selected user-generated picture posts and a corresponding number of picture posts from four destination management organisations using a classification system of 27 attribute categories to analyse the content. The results show that tourists and tourism organisations use similar attributes to depict the destination image. The results shed light on the coexistence of categories in visual representations and highlight the importance of understanding both projected and perceived destination images and how they align.

Most studies on residents' pro-tourism behaviour have mainly focused on the influence of economic and non-economic factors as individuals in the role of residents, resulting in the oversight of potential mutual influence amongst other roles that residents may assume, including that of tourists. Therefore, this study employs role transition and emotional contagion theories to construct a research model, aiming to delve into the influence of positive emotion and emotional solidarity when an individual alternates between the roles of tourist and resident. A survey instrument was administered to gather data from 360 residents of Huangshan, a small inland city in southeastern China. Utilizing partial least squares-structural equation modelling, the study hypotheses were empirically tested. The findings reveal that an individual's positive emotion and emotional solidarity as a tourist significantly and positively impact their corresponding emotion and emotional solidarity when acting as a resident. Furthermore, the latter exerts a significant influence on their pro-tourism behaviour. Additionally, this research reveals that susceptibility to emotional contagion positively amplifies the impact of individuals' positive emotion as tourists on their emotional solidarity when assuming the role of a resident. The paper discusses theoretical and managerial implications derived from these findings. Lastly, the study acknowledges limitations in variable selection, emotional contagion processes, and destination types, suggesting future research directions.

Photos are an important tool for understanding the minds of travelers and characterizing the tourism destination image, and they play a unique role in the construction of tourism images. The wide application of deep learning techniques has brought new opportunities for the visual content analysis of images. This paper proposes a framework for comprehensively analyzing the image of tourist destinations and for targeted tourism planning. Firstly, this paper utilizes deep learning techniques to perceive images from three perspectives: image scene, visual aesthetics and emotional experience, based on photos of inbound tourists in Beijing on the Flickr website. Secondly, spatial visualization analysis of the perceived image is carried out with the help of tourism resource distribution to provide suggestions for tourism planning. The results show that: (1) Beijing's inbound tourism cognitive images can be categorized as food, culture, people, architecture, recreation, natural scenery, city life, animals and infrastructure. (2) The categories of architecture, culture and natural scenery have a higher quality of visual aesthetics and more positive emotional arousal. (3) Spatially, Beijing's inbound tourism image shows the structural characteristics of multi-core aggregation. The findings provide relevant theoretical and practical guidance for destination planning and management.

The goal of this research was to develop and validate an integrative model for memorable wildlife tourism experience. The study examined how escapism, experience co-creation, existential authenticity, and experiential satisfaction serve as drivers of memorable wildlife experience. It further explored the connection between memorable wildlife tourism experience and hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being, place attachment and pro-environmental behaviour. The sample consists of 361 international tourists aged 18 years or more who visited the Mole National Park in Ghana between October 2022 and September 2023 for a wildlife safari. Results reveals that as experience co-creation, experiential authenticity, and experiential satisfaction increase, the more memorable wildlife tourism experience becomes. Enhanced experiential satisfaction and memorable experiences are associated with heightened hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being, place attachment, and pro-environmental behaviour. The theoretical and managerial implications as well as recommendations for future studies are presented.

Vicarious experiences in tourism possess significant marketing implications. While numerous studies have explored how various forms of vicarious experiences can impact an individual, the role of different time spans as a key factor determining the extent of said impact has been neglected in prior research. To address this gap, the present study thus bridges environmental psychology with the context of tourism and applies the theory of mental representations. An experiment (n = 359) was designed to examine differences in select mental representation dimensions (cognitive, affective, conative, and sensorial) among male and female Chinese college students who have zero/medium/maximum durations of constant vicarious experiences related to European destinations in their home environment. The results indicate that the medium duration of constant vicarious experiences leads to the most positive changes in cognitive and conative dimensions, while the longest constant vicarious experiences produce desirable affective dimension outcomes. Moreover, male college students seem to be more susceptible to the influences of such constant vicarious experiences.

Health tourism involves the promotion of healthy and sustainable lifestyles, and is becoming an increasingly popular segment with high potential for further growth. This study focuses on the relationship between health destinations and tourists' perceived quality of life and examines the motivations and behaviors of health tourists in China. The research is built on therapeutic landscape and attention restoration theories. The study analyzed 506 valid questionnaires collected in Sanya, China, and found: 1) the social aspects of therapeutic landscapes had a direct positive effect on tourists' perceived quality of life; 2) the perceived restorative qualities of destinations mediated the positive effect of the identified dimensions of therapeutic landscapes on tourists' perceived quality of life; and 3) psychological recovery mediated the positive effects of the physical and symbolic aspects of therapeutic landscapes on tourists' perceived quality of life. The study enriches the therapeutic landscape theory, encourages its application in tourism research, and provides actionable insights for health destinations to improve tourists’ well-being.