Journal of Destination Marketing & Management最新文献

This paper assesses the degree of specialization of tourism destinations along European coasts. It presents a European tourism database and a method based on Data Envelopment Analysis for creating an index of tourism specialization that ranks European basins, countries, and regions at the smallest Eurostat geocoding layer. The set of indicators selected respond to the economic logic of the tourism industry within three vectors: Demand, Supply & employment, and Attractions & amenities. Mediterranean and some Northern European destinations have high levels of tourism specialization while others, mostly in Eastern Europe, rank low in the index. This serves to identify some tourism profiles that provide some insights into the potential for tourism development of the European coasts, which may help in the recovery of the sector and in the management of its transition to a green tourism.

This research investigates tourists’ reactions and perceptions about content-specific elements such as minority languages found on destination websites and social media accounts. Via an experimental study in the context of the Ladin minority of South Tyrol (Italy), the aim is to provide a greater understanding of online destination marketing, destination brand image, and social media engagement. The key contribution of this paper is that is reveals the explanatory mechanism of minority language text element effects on consumer response. We specifically show that perceived place authenticity and the emotional brand experience serve as mediating variables. These results are important for online destination marketing in how content-specific elements like minority languages contribute to a higher destination brand image as well as online media engagement through the mediation of perceived place authenticity and emotional brand experience. Promotional material that highlights a minority language is fundamental for minority destinations.

The concept of smartness and smart tourism is gaining traction in the academic world; often applied to developed tourist destinations, this concept could also be applied in rural, developing and emerging areas to enable meaningful actor-to-actor relationships. Results of this research show the importance of focusing on human aspects of smartness for the co-creation of mutual value for host and guests. Based on triangulation of different data sources from a single case study in rural Lebanon, this research outlines how community-based contextual elements and culture, along with appropriate technology literacy auditing, should be considered when designing digital solutions that foster a meaningful and value-driven host-guest relationship.

This research formalises a new methodology to measure and analyse Destination Brand Experience, improving upon traditional approaches by offering greater objectivity and rigour. Adopting a case study approach, five distinct and complementary types of analysis have been conducted: comprehensive sentiment analysis and topic modelling, an analysis using multiple thesauri, statistical analyses for hypothesis testing, and machine learning for classification. The methodological innovation, through the construction of thesauri, has enabled the measurement of sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioural dimensions in unique and emblematic attractions, experiences, and transportation within a tourist destination, based on visitor reviews. This new approach allows tourism professionals and destination managers to identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance tourist satisfaction. The findings suggest that there are significant differences in the relationships between specific dimensions and that gender and culture moderate or impact these relationships.

This study underlines customers' value to contemporary theme parks in terms of customer citizenship behavior (CCB). Considering the frequency of customer-to-customer interaction and its impacts on tourist experience, this study aims to explore how other customers influence CCB in theme parks. Based on the cognition-affect-behavior model and the affect theory of social exchange, a model is constructed and tested with covariance-based structural equation modeling using survey data from 409 theme park visitors in China. The results show that the focal customers' perceptions of others (i.e. similarity and suitable behavior) can elicit customer-customer rapport (i.e. enjoyable interaction and personal connection), which in turn promotes target-based CCB (i.e. towards organizations, employees, and other customers) via affective commitment. This study extends the current theoretical knowledge on customer-customer rapport and CCB, and provides practical guidelines for theme park managers.

This paper explores the role and significance of spatial units in online tourism marketing and branding. The analysis is based on the application of different regional typologies as categorization units in understanding and analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of tourism websites. The study combines four distinct ways of classifying regions into a spatial framework to systematize the properties of online tourism data. The research questions are addressed through data collection from Finnish municipalities, focusing on online tourism marketing websites. Results indicate that large municipalities, urban areas, and popular tourism regions are more invested in online tourism marketing and branding in comparison to smaller municipalities, rural areas, and less popular tourism regions. Rural municipalities locating close to large urban areas have low scores in the investigated variables, suggesting that they rely on their proximity to urban areas for online tourism marketing and branding. While likely advantageous, the use of distinct marketing tools (logos, slogans, locational highlights, and interest hotspots) is relatively limited in the data. The paper concludes by stressing the need for strategic and comprehensive approaches, collaboration with stakeholders, creativity, and innovative methods in tourism management, particularly for smaller municipalities.

This study explored the relationship between metaverse experience and travel decisions through a survey of 459 Brazilian ZEPETO users. The results show that well-organized affordances had a significant impact on users' sense of presence. Neither social realism nor cyber sickness had a significant impact on immersion, but spatial presence was strongly correlated with immersion and place attachment. Higher immersion did not consistently lead to higher place attachment or intention to visit South Korea. These findings highlight the need for well-designed affordances to enhance presence in the metaverse. While perceptions of co-presence and spatial presence can promote place attachment, they can also have potentially negative effects by inducing excessive immersion. Nevertheless, moderate use of metaverses can be a powerful tourism strategy by stimulating the desire to visit replicated places. The study suggests that the feeling of being with other users in a particular virtual space that represents the real world well can create an attachment to a place and lead to more visits.

This article discusses the history and status quo of traditional tourism motivation theories as well as their shortcomings. By adopting a collective approach to motivation, this study proposes a framework that examines tourism motivations from a complex adaptive system's perspective. To conduct this study, the destination-motivation semantic system was designed as a bipartite scale-free network that takes in inputs such as values, costs, benefits, experiences, reasons to avoid/approach, attitudes, and expectations, and delivers the outputs of motivational force (valence) and destination utility. Next, by employing expectancy and utility theories and applying the principles of information theory, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics, several appraisals were developed to determine the system's state, structure, and functionality. Finally, a toy model that presents the empirical proof of the proposed framework is depicted.

The tourscape concept is recently coined to represent the general atmosphere experienced by tourists in a destination and includes four dimensions (stimuli): physical, social, socially symbolic, and natural dimensions. Tourist perception of these stimuli is relevant for the development of a tourist destination. This study proposes for the first time that tourscape can also be an important element of the environmental sustainability of a tourist destination when it is in harmony with the environment, since tourscape can play a key role in the tourist experience by eliciting positive intentions and behaviors towards a destination. Based on the stimuli-organism-response (SOR) model, this study analyzes how tourscape elements influence tourists’ revisit intention when they are perceived to be in harmony with the care of the environment through identification with the tourist destination and trust. The results of a sample of 872 tourists show that each dimension of the tourscape is positively related to destination identification. Furthermore, destination identification is directly related to revisit intention, and indirectly related to revisit intention through trust. This study highlights the implications for destination management organizations, with strategic suggestions on how to increase tourist perception regarding the sustainability of the destination and promote revisit intention.