Tourism-Receiving Countries in Connotative Google Space

Assuming an unbroken interest of tourism researchers and NTO managers in destination
images this article offers a new measurement framework. Emotion carrying
connotations are proposed to form a grounded concept of destination image. Country
names associated with an equivalent mixture of connotative items are likely to arouse
similar emotional reactions of Web users when browsing tourism-related pages. The cooccurrence
frequencies of connotative nouns and tourism receiving country names in
WWW content serve as a basis for measuring the countries' positions in connotative
space. Transforming the raw frequencies into Normalized Google Distances makes
them comparable. Automated data retrieval operates for the Web domain defined by
'tourism OR tourist OR travel OR trip'. Portraying the destination countries' similarity
in terms of connotative profiles is demonstrated with disjunctive and non-disjunctive
hierarchical clustering, network analysis, and Sammon mapping.
Key Words: tourism receiving countries; destination image; Normalized Google
Distance; Semantic Web; Internet.