Abstract
The explosion of content generated by users, in parallel with the spectacular growth of social media and the proliferation of mobile devices, is causing a paradigm shift in research. Surveys or interviews are no longer necessary to obtain users’ opinions, because researchers can get this information freely on social media. In the field of tourism, online travel reviews (OTRs) hosted on travel-related websites stand out. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of OTRs to analyse the image of a tourist destination. For this, a theoretical and methodological framework is defined, as well as metrics that allow for measuring different aspects (designative, appraisive and prescriptive) of the tourist image. The model is applied to the region of Attica (Greece) through a random sample of 300,000 TripAdvisor OTRs about attractions, activities, restaurants and hotels written in English between 2013 and 2018. The results show trends, preferences, assessments, and opinions from the demand side, which can be useful for destination managers in optimising the distribution of available resources and promoting sustainability.
Highlights
Nations, states, cities, and regions commit considerable effort and funds to improving their tourist destination image (TDI) and attractiveness [1]
In all sections, the spatial dimension shows a high concentration of online travel reviews (OTRs) in the metropolis and very little in the West Attica subregion
It is noteworthy that the number of restaurants’ OTRs is growing, while it is decreasing in the case of attractions and hotels
Summary
States, cities, and regions commit considerable effort and funds to improving their tourist destination image (TDI) and attractiveness [1]. The image of a city [3], country [4], region [5], or tourist destination [6,7,8] has been the subject of constant study for more than half a century in countless scientific publications. This great production on destination image has led to systematic reviews [9,10,11,12] and meta-analyses [13,14]. The agents of image formation can be divided into three groups according to the origin of the sources [18,19]: induced (emanating from the destination promoters), organic (transmitted between individuals) and autonomous (produced independently of the previous ones)
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