Exploring Emotional and Memorable Tourism Experiences

The image of a tourist destination should be thoroughly investigated before product positioning attempts are undertaken. In this paper, components of a tourist destination image of Barcelona in the Chinese market are identified. A qualitative analysis software is used to process the data collected from a set of semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Three factors of perceptual image and four factors of affective image are discovered. The results show that the majority of the Chinese tourists prefer cultural and architecture tourism products rather than the sun and beach product. Shopping is one of the most important activities within any tourism products for the Chinese tourists. On the other hand, communication and interaction between tour guides and visitors is one of the important components of a tourism product. The results of the study provide useful suggestions for the design and marketing of tourism products in general.