JHASS
Urban Tourism Image, Heritage Communication, and Destination Marketing in the New Media Era: Evidence from Lanzhou, China
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Abstract
New media platforms increasingly shape how urban destinations are imagined, evaluated, and converted into travel decisions. For cities with distinctive cultural resources but relatively uneven market visibility, the central challenge is not only to attract online attention but also to transform digital exposure into durable tourist recognition, service satisfaction, and destination loyalty. Taking Lanzhou, a Yellow River cultural city in Northwest China, as an empirical case, this study examines tourists’ perceptions of urban tourism image, heritage communication, and destination marketing in the new media environment. Based on 242 valid questionnaire responses, the study analyzes information sources, content exposure, interactive behavior, perceived image dimensions, visit experience, behavioral intention, and optimization demands. The results show that short-video platforms and social media are the dominant channels through which tourists encounter Lanzhou, while food, historical culture, and natural landscapes form the most recognizable image configuration. The image perception scale shows strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.977), and principal component analysis indicates a stable overall perceptual structure. However, service facilities, transportation convenience, information accessibility, and interaction mechanisms remain weaker than resource-based image elements. Regression results further suggest that expectation fulfilment and perceived consumption rationality explain revisit intention more strongly than overall image perception alone. The study contributes to the literature on urban tourism image and heritage communication by showing how a second-tier cultural tourism city can convert platform visibility into an integrated destination brand through cultural interpretation, authentic user-generated content, service touchpoint optimization, and cross-platform marketing coordination.
Keywords
Urban tourism image; heritage communication; destination marketing; new media communication; tourist perception; Lanzhou; China
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How to cite this paper
Urban Tourism Image, Heritage Communication, and Destination Marketing in the New Media Era: Evidence from Lanzhou, China
How to cite this paper: Mei Bai. (2026) Urban Tourism Image, Heritage Communication, and Destination Marketing in the New Media Era: Evidence from Lanzhou, China. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(6), 681-692.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.06.011
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