Brand gestalt cognition and tourists’ destination decision making: a study of international island destinations

Destination brand cognition plays an important role in tourists’ decisions. This study constructs a decision-making framework based on the brand gestalt model to investigate how brand gestalt cognition influences tourists’ destination choices. Findings were drawn from 182,357 online comments about seven international island destinations, posted on Chinese tourism social media platforms. Data were processed using emotion mining technology and random forest machine learning methods. Results showed that (1) the environment and product/service providers were key factors affecting tourists’ decision making in island destinations. (2) Individuals’ decision-making preferences were grouped into four types: environment–product/service preferences, story–product/service preferences, environment–experience preferences, and environment–tourist preferences. (3) Island destinations possessing strong competitiveness in all dimensions of brand gestalt could more effectively meet tourists’ needs. This study enriches understanding of tourists’ decision making from a brand gestalt perspective, and implications are provided for building destinations’ brand ecosystems.