A comparison of destination images from three different perspectives

抄録

In Japan, many local governments are currently investing more effort into promoting inbound tourism. Many studies have been conducted to examine destination image in Japan. However, few studies investigate the differences in point of view between Japanese tourists and foreign tourists toward particular tourist attractions. Depending upon the tourist’s country of origin, there are variances in preferences or impressions of such locations. In addition, tourism promoters have their own ideas about which tourist attractions they want to recommend in their cities or towns. This study investigates the differences in destination image of a particular tourist attraction held by Japanese tourists and foreign tourists using a data mining approach toward analyzing the text data from reviews posted on TripAdvisor. Moreover, the information in the official sightseeing websites was analyzed using text mining with respect to Japanese and English text data in order to compare the results of Japanese and foreign tourists’ destination images of a particular tourist attraction. It was found that different destination images arose from one tourist attraction between Japanese and English texts. In addition, there were some sightseeing events that were not in the destination images of tourists , which can consider to be a recommendation by local promoters.