Research on the perception of the terrain image of the tourism destination based on multimodal user-generated content data

Abstract

Destination image is a powerful means by which destinations compete in the tourism industry, and the accurate identification of a destination image better serves destination marketing and management. This study uses multimodal data, such as text, images, and videos uploaded by tourists, to construct a comprehensive and systematic destination image process. The ‘‘cognitive-emotional-overall image’’ model, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, and deep residual neural networks are implemented to build a framework to examine the perception of a destination image, travelogues, and short videos from the sources called Ctrip, Qunar, and TikTok. The results show that tourists’ overall perception of Sanya is based mainly on the cognitive image of natural scenery, human resources, and food. In addition, there are differences between textual and visual cognitive images among the perceptual images when multimodal data is under consideration. Furthermore, tourists have an overall positive affective image of Sanya as a destination.