Barcelona: New stakeholders and new images in social media reviews

© 2016 Cognizant, LLC. Image creation for destinations is undergoing a revolution based on the consolidation of spaces on the Internet as well as the Internet's capacity to empower new actors (or stakeholders) and discourses. The literature emphasizes the role of websites and travel blogs as key spaces in generating this image, strengthening the actions of official entities, service providers, and travel bloggers in its projection as well as highlighting the lack of communication between them. Using the case of the Turisme de Barcelona website and TripAdvisor forum, the present article goes a step further, analyzing the increasing role of social media in this process, as social media give both past and future travelers as well as residents the ability to generate destination images in a dialogue-based discourse that gives a deeper and clearer vision of diverse resources-particular tourism products-and urban spaces. This user-generated content can be useful for destination management organizations in adapting resources and infrastructures to tourists as well as residents.