Measuring Gastronomic Image Online

Estela Marine-Roig, Berta Ferrer-Rosell, Natalia Daries and Eduard Cristobal-Fransi
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Estela Marine-Roig: Department of Business Administration, University of Lleida, Catalonia, C. Jaume II, 73, 25001 Lleida, Spain
Berta Ferrer-Rosell: Department of Business Administration, University of Lleida, Catalonia, C. Jaume II, 73, 25001 Lleida, Spain
Natalia Daries: Department of Business Administration, University of Lleida, Catalonia, C. Jaume II, 73, 25001 Lleida, Spain
Eduard Cristobal-Fransi: Department of Business Administration, University of Lleida, Catalonia, C. Jaume II, 73, 25001 Lleida, Spain

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 23, 1-21

Abstract: Culinary or gastronomic tourism has become one of the main exponents of cultural tourism and a key element of a destination’s image identity. Since travellers consult and produce online travel reviews (OTR) before and during a trip, this research aims to provide and implement a framework for analysing OTRs of dining establishments to measure their contribution to destination image formation in their designative (cognitive) and appraisive (affective and evaluative) aspects. To do this, a website was selected from which to download OTRs, extract useful information from the textual and paratextual elements, build a keyword frequency matrix, and perform a quantitative and thematic content analysis. This method was applied to a random sample of 500,000 OTRs from the TripAdvisor restaurants section, written in English, between 2013 and 2017, by tourists visiting the Canary Islands. Results show that, although the gastronomic image of the destination is positive in general, the local and regional gastronomy representative of the community’s sociocultural identity is not the most popular nor the best valued in tourists’ comments. This research shows a method to measure the main aspects that make up the gastronomic image of a destination and that allow for extracting insights and business intelligence through big data from user-generated content.

Keywords: culinary tourism; gastronomy; restaurant; dining; destination image; user-generated content; big data analytics; online travel review; TripAdvisor; Canary Islands (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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