Using Travel Sites’ UGC To Examine Perceived Destination Image: The Case Of Zhangjiajie

We have already entered into the "Content-Dominated" Internet Era. A large number of network travel notes on the travelling sites are affecting the travel decisions of tourists or potential tourists. Online travel UGC has many characteristics, such as authenticity, diversity, effectiveness, spontaneity and universality. As a piece of treasure to be excavated, it is a powerful supplement for the traditional questionnaire inquiry method to investigate the image perception of tourism destination. However, at present, as there is only word frequency analysis in terms of domestic qualitative analysis of online travel UGC, it is almost a blank in the in-depth and detailed qualitative analysis research.With Zhangjiajie city as the research case, this study carries out qualitative research by using NVivo10.0 software. It follows the steps of text collection-primary encoding-category building-re-coding-results analysis. Text collection:143 travel notes on the two websites are chosen as the research object from Ctrip Advice Community which ranks the first and Cellular Network which ranks the second in the industry; primary encoding: the travel notes captured are browsed on the one hand, while the content is classified on the other (that is, the content required is encoded in the specified nodes). The encoded text of 120624 words is obtained after primary encoding (wide coverage-134 nodes, rich content-7184 reference points); category building refers to building the image perception model of the destination Zhangjiajie; re-coding:the primary encoding is amended and re-coded by combining with the model; results analysis:the visual matrix, charts and models are generated.The purpose of this study is to determine the tourists’image perception of Zhangjiajie in online travel notes, including cognitive image and affective image. Based on the "congnitive-affective" image perception model of travel destination put forward by Baloglu & McCleary, this paper builds the tourists’"congnitive-affective" image perception model of Zhangjiajie. Through a lot of coding, re-coding and results analysis, the paper obtains the tourists’cognitive image perception of Zhangjiajie in online travel UGC, including both natural and cultural attractions, scenic environment and atmosphere, tourist facilities and services, cognitive image of the urban environment and atmosphere, and the related affect image; the positive emotion image accounted for 71.66% of all the tourists’ affect image perception of Zhangjiajie, while for the composite image constituted by two types of images-revisit intention, tourists only showed 24.48% of revisit intention, which is not high. This study is conducive to enriching and perfecting the theory and research methods about user generation content, and expanding the research perspectives of online travel UGC.According to the results of qualitative analysis, this study aims to fix the "weakness" in Zhangjiajie’s destination cognitive image and puts forward some suggestions for enhancing the tourism image of Zhangjiajie by combining with the social psychology effects; it makes use of the cognitive image which can effectively encourage tourists to generate positive emotions image, and makes effective marketing strategy, especially the marketing strategies of making use of the online travel UGC platform.