IJERPH, Vol. 16, Pages 4631: Measuring Gastronomic Image Online (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health)

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.