Sanya’s Tourism Image Splits Across Official, Press, and Tourist Narratives
Sanya’s reputation as a destination did not travel as a single story. Across a decade of press coverage, official messaging, and traveler-authored content, the city’s image fractured into distinct narrative systems that emphasized different places, different meanings, and different emotional cues. The gap was present before COVID-19, but it widened sharply once the pandemic reshaped travel behavior and public communication. The clearest signal came from the Aitchison distance, which rose from 19.574 in 2013–2019 to 40.648 in 2020–2022.
That jump points to more than simple variation in wording. It reflects a structural separation between how institutions framed the destination and how visitors described it after experiencing it themselves.
Cognitive Content Stayed Centered on Tourism, but the Framing Diverged
Across the cognitive dimension, the three media types shared some overlap around “tourism/hotels,” which suggests that Sanya’s core identity remained legible across channels. Yet the surrounding content diverged in ways that matter for destination branding. Tourist Generated Content focused more tightly on “coastal + food,” while Press Generated Content and Official Generated Content leaned toward policy-related elements.
This is where image control becomes fragile. When official and press narratives foreground governance, strategy, and destination management while tourists talk about beaches, meals, and firsthand pleasure, the destination is no longer being described through the same lens. The result is not merely a difference in emphasis; it is a mismatch in what each audience believes Sanya actually is. In practical terms, that kind of divergence can weaken the coherence of destination marketing because prospective visitors encounter multiple versions of the same place before they ever arrive.
Spatial Preferences Revealed a Persistent Mismatch
The spatial dimension exposed an even sharper dissonance. Policy-driven spaces occupied a central place in official and press material, while tourists gravitated toward spaces they found useful, memorable, or experiential. Those two patterns did not line up cleanly.
This gap matters because tourism is always spatially lived, not just verbally described. A destination is assembled through routes, landmarks, check-in spots, and the movement of bodies through place. When official narratives privilege spaces chosen for administrative or promotional reasons, but tourists repeatedly attach value to other sites, a destination image begins to split between planned geography and lived geography. The study’s findings show a systematic dissonance between institutional promotion and on-the-ground practice.
Affect Was Positive on the Surface, but Negative Needs Emerged in Tourist Content
Emotionally, the image of Sanya was dominated by enjoyment and romance across the overall corpus. On the surface, that sounds reassuring for a leisure destination. But the affective layer was not uniformly polished. Tourist Generated Content included expressions of unmet needs, while Official Generated Content suppressed negative material.
This pattern is clinically precise in its own way: positive branding can coexist with unresolved dissatisfaction. When tourists voice practical frustrations or unmet expectations and official channels minimize those signals, the destination’s emotional profile becomes sanitized. The promotional frame remains upbeat, but it may fail to reflect the lived quality of the visitor experience. For destination managers, the implication is straightforward. Emotional harmony in branded communication does not guarantee emotional alignment in actual use.
Pandemic Conditions Intensified Narrative Separation
The contrast between the pre-pandemic and pandemic-affected periods is the most consequential part of the analysis. Before COVID-19, cross-media differences already existed, but they were less severe. During 2020–2022, the divergence sharpened, and the Aitchison distance nearly doubled.
Public health disruption changed how places were described, remembered, and promoted. Travel restrictions, shifting risk perceptions, and heightened attention to policy likely pushed official and press narratives toward institutional concerns, while tourist accounts remained tied to lived experience, consumption, and immediate satisfaction. The pandemic did not create the mismatch; it amplified it. In a period when travel confidence was already under strain, narrative inconsistency may have carried a stronger cost because travelers had fewer external cues to reconcile conflicting representations.
CoDA Made the Hidden Structure of the Gap Visible
The study’s methodological choice is central to its contribution. Compositional Data Analysis was used to measure how parts of a whole were distributed across media, which is particularly useful when comparing destination images built from different narrative ingredients. Traditional content analysis can identify themes, but CoDA captures proportional relationships and relative emphasis. In a setting where one media stream stresses policy, another stresses coast and food, and a third suppresses negative feeling, those proportions are the substance of the story.
The tripartite framework—cognitive, spatial, and affective—also broadened the analysis beyond the usual two-part image models. Tourism image research has often separated cognition from affect, but place-based experience is not that simple. Space, identity, and emotion move together. A traveler’s image of a destination is built from what the place is said to be, where attention is directed, and how the experience feels once the trip unfolds.
Destination Management Needs Alignment, Not Just Promotion
The findings point toward a basic management problem: image consistency cannot be treated as a branding afterthought. If official messaging keeps privileging policy language while tourists keep describing beaches, food, and unmet needs, the destination message will remain fragmented. The same applies to spatial emphasis. Promotional narratives need to reflect the places that tourists actually find meaningful, not only the spaces that are easiest to feature in institutional communication.
A more workable strategy would bring the three media systems into closer conversation. Official channels can preserve destination identity without flattening visitor experience, and press coverage can help bridge institutional framing with real traveler concerns. Tourist content should not be treated as a nuisance signal; it is the most direct record of what visitors notice, enjoy, and resent.
The study closes with targeted recommendations for narrowing the image gap, but the underlying issue is already plain. Sanya’s tourism image is not singular, and the distance between its narrative versions widened when the pandemic increased pressure on every communication channel.