Geografie 2026, 131, 279-303
Destination image across Chinese- and English-language reviews of Macao’s Historic Centre: A cognitive-affective-behavioral analysis
Nanjing University of the Arts, School of Cultural Industries, Nanjing, China
Received March 2026
Accepted July 2026
This study investigates cross-cultural differences in the perceived destination image of the Historic Centre of Macao across Chinese- and English-language reviews of the Historic Centre of Macao. Grounded in the cognitive-affective-behavioral framework, it analyzes user-generated content from Ctrip, MaFengWo, and Tripadvisor. Latent Dirichlet Allocation was used to identify cognitive themes, a Support Vector Machine classifier to estimate sentiment polarity, and semantic co-occurrence networks to examine action-related language. The two language-platform corpora exhibited distinct but overlapping patterns across the three analytical dimensions. Cognitively, Chinese-language reviews emphasize iconic landmarks and symbolic heritage attractions, whereas English-language reviews focus more on the atmosphere of East-West cultural integration and immersive experiences. Affectively, both groups show predominantly positive attitudes, but Chinese-language reviews more frequently foreground crowding, whereas English-language reviews more frequently emphasize cultural interpretation and experiential value. In action-related language, the Chinese-language reviews is more landmark- and photography-oriented, whereas the English-language reviews is more strongly associated with walking, exploration, and learning.
Keywords
heritage tourism, destination image, cross-cultural research, cognitive-affective-behavioral theory, user-generated content, historic centre of Macao.
