This work examines the projected image of Romania as an emerging tourism destination. Computed content-analysis was applied to the photos, text and video materials promoted online in Romania’s last international tourism campaign. The conceptual framework used corresponds to intrinsic values (play, aesthetics, ethics and spirituality), from Holbrook’s typology of value. Being more difficult to apprehend and therefore studied less, intrinsic values allow a more sophisticated approach to value creation. The purpose here is to identify the main attributes that are promoted about Romania by destination marketing organizations. The content analysis of text (last international promotion campaign Explore the Carpathian Garden) and visual data (27 photos from the official Facebook webpage and 7 TV videos) allow to depict an experiential view of Romania’s image: natural resources (coded as aesthetics with 29% of references), epistemic value of discovery (play 25.8%), authentic and historical traditions (ethics 25.8%) and wellness and therapeutic activities (spirituality, 19.3%). Destination marketing organizations have the potential to develop some distinctive aspects such as authenticity (as an ethical value dimension) and play (as an active, self-oriented value). Findings also highlight that a complimentary approach using textual and visual data might be a suitable option to research destination brand image.

The general objective of this study is to explore and identify the perception about Romania as a tourist destination based on travellers’ blogs; we therefore aim to explore and identify the main elements of the image of Romania as a tourist destination based on these blogs. Data were collected manually during May 2021 using the search keywords “travel blogs” and “Romania” on the Google search engine (201 entries). Further, both a word frequency analysis (quantitative), and a content analysis (qualitative) were conducted to ascertain which places are most frequently mentioned in tourists’ travel posts, and the words most often used to describe their experience. The results shown that both destination-specific and primary image attributes are essential to understand visitors’ perceptions through travel blogs. Managerial and practical implications also emerge for tourism managers to improve the destination image of Romania.

Purpose: The literature review reveals that lake tourism and lake-destination areas (LDA) have been particularly absent from destination image (DI) studies over 45 years of research. In fact, there is a lack of research concerning the characteristics of lake tourism, particularly related to the attributes involved in the formation of lake-DI. Therefore, this paper aims to explore lake tourism and lake-DI based on the Alqueva Lake more thoroughly, it being the biggest man-made lake in Europe, as an emerging lake-destination area located in the south of Portugal. Design/methodology/approach: Within this, the perceptions of stakeholders professionally involved with this type of destination were examined through 17 semi-structured interviews based on content-analysis as a qualitative technique. Framed by the important contribution of visual-based research in tourism studies, this study adopts two approaches: an attribute-based approach (textual data) and a photo-based approach (visual data), to strengthen the concept, characteristics and dimensions of lake tourism and image attributes applied to this type of destinations. Multiple techniques of extracting data were used, demonstrating the importance of using various techniques in obtaining image attributes as a first step in assessing DIs. Findings: The findings revealed textual and pictorial attributes related to lake tourism and LDA, which confirms that although image attributes are universally important, depicting specific attributes is important considering particular types of tourism, such as lake tourism. Originality/value: This is a very recent sub-field of DI studies, which justifies its investigation on a theoretical as well as on a practical management level.