Foodscape conceptualizes the dynamic human–food–place nexus. Tourism provides a cross-cultural context where tourists can consume different destination foods and places, during which multiple types of destination foodscapes are produced. However, few studies explore how to frame the types and connotations of destination foodscape. Tourists’ travelogues provide a rich database to examine this question. Through netnography, this study collects and analyzes 86 posts of travelogues published from 2012 to 2019 in Mafengwo, a famous Chinese online travel community, about Chinese tourists’ food experiences in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We summarize five types of destination foodscapes, globalized recreational foodscape, staged local foodscape, glocalized foodscape, authentic local foodscape, and overseas ethnic foodscape in which tourists obtain different familiar-novelty hybrid experiences. This study contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue between food and tourism literature by proposing a coordinate framework with two axes, the spectrum of cultural distance and the spectrum of serving tourists/locals, to classify destination foodscape and a six-dimensional network construct to reveal the connotations of destination foodscape. Relevant strategies for promoting destination food and tourism development are also provided.
With the development of the Web 2.0 era, tourists can freely publish their destination experiences through online travel notes. This enables tourists to become important agents to project tourism destination image (TDI), impacting destination-sustainable development. Previous studies have compared the difference in the images projected by destination management organizations (DMO) and tourists through their published content. However, fewer studies have been done to explore the inter-influences between them on the diachronic process of TDI construction. From the perspective of “circle of representation” this question is researched through a case study of Chiang Mai, Thailand, regarding the market of mainland Chinese tourists. Through interviews and the collection of microblogs from the Thailand National Tourism Bureau and tourists’ travel notes from 2009 to 2021, we found that Chiang Mai has experienced four stages of TDI construction, during which the “Xiao Qingxin” image is evolutionally constructed and formed into the representation circle. The inter-influences between DMO and tourists, as well as the influencing factors in this process, are summarized. Our study supplements a dynamic diachronic analysis of TDI from the constructivism perspective. Relevant management and marketing applications for TDI and destination sustainability in the post-pandemic and Web 2.0 era are also provided.