Chinese Outbound Tourists’ Destination Image of America

This study compares the U.S. destination image of four groups of Chinese travelers with different travel horizons. The authors attempt to explore new and effective ways of comparing qualitative image information using methodological approaches from other disciplines. Specifically, they introduce and examine the concepts of destination image richness, evenness, and dominance, analogous to such concepts in biology as species richness, species evenness, and species dominance. Furthermore, the pattern of destination image distribution for the four groups is also explored from a perspective of a power law distribution often used in economic analyses. The obtained results partially support the travel horizon proposition. By applying ideas from other disciplines to the study of destination image, the authors hope that this study contributes both to the image literature and interdisciplinary research on tourism in general.