Organic destination imagery and social media: Mapping tourism dynamics across China’s Greater Bay Area cities

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Gunn’s formative concept of organic destination image this study proposes an application and extension in a contemporary regional context. Noting that the formation of destination image now emanates from tourists as well as from tourism businesses, the researchers use a prominent Chinese social media platform – the Red – to evaluate tourist/user generated content on the destination image of the ‘9 + 2’ Greater Bay Area cities in southern China (9 mainland cites plus Macao and Hong Kong SARs). The authors employed computer-aided lexical analysis on over 10,000 posts extracted from the Red. Four clusters of designative and prescriptive image are revealed. The study contributes to knowledge by applying big data analytics to study destination image from the tourist perspective (user-generated organic image), especially in a regional context. The insights offer prospective benefits to destination planners at local and regional levels by showing the merits of mobilizing tourism resources across multiple cities.