Destination image across Chinese- and English-language reviews of Macao’s Historic Centre: A cognitive-affective-behavioral analysis

A comparative analysis of Chinese- and English-language reviews reveals distinct yet overlapping perceptions of Macao’s Historic Centre, shaped by cultural and linguistic nuances. While both groups express predominantly positive attitudes, Chinese-language reviews emphasize iconic landmarks and symbolic heritage, often highlighting crowding, whereas English-language reviews focus more on the immersive atmosphere of East-West cultural integration and experiential value. Action-related language in Chinese reviews leans toward photography and landmark visits, while English reviews associate strongly with walking, exploration, and learning. The study employed advanced text-mining techniques—Latent Dirichlet Allocation for cognitive themes, a Support Vector Machine classifier for sentiment analysis, and semantic co-occurrence networks—to unpack these differences across user-generated content from Ctrip, MaFengWo, and Tripadvisor.

Pang, J.-R. (2026). Destination image across Chinese- and English-language reviews of Macao’s Historic Centre: A cognitive-affective-behavioral analysis. Geografie, 131(3), 279–303. https://doi.org/10.37040/geografie.2026.014