In the context of globalization, the essential nature of places has been neglected in the development and marketing of tourism destinations. The competition of tourism destinations has moved towards a trap at the convergence of “no placeness” and “no personality” (or no distinctive features). Incorporating the placeness theory of geography, the brand personality theory of marketing, the push-pull theory of tourism, and the resource-based theory of management, the theory of destination placeality proposes that the key to the successful development and marketing of a tourism destination relies on placeality: that is, focusing on the essential nature of the destination lifestyle formed through a long-term accumulation, and distinguishing (or differentiating) itself from other tourism destinations. It further argues that representative, attractive, and competitive destination placeality is the brand DNA of tourism destinations. From the perspective of the government, tourists, and residents of tourism destinations, the paper uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to create an index system of destination placeality composed of the natural environment, humanistic environment, and group characteristics.

The regional research on residents’ sense of place has special significance in terms of deepening the understanding of “people-place” relations, shaping the endemicity of tourist destinations, developing and protecting tourist resources, and planning tourism. According to the existing literature, most research, at present, discusses the influencing effects of human demography characteristics, the physical environment, and the social environment, but few scholars have focused on people’s active function. In other words, there is a lack of discussion on the problem of sense of place generated by the dynamic interaction between people and field in the tourism world. Thus, based on the perspective of community tourism participation, this research collects the tourism participation practices claimed by the villagers of Langde Village by means of fieldwork and analyzes the problem generated by residents’ sense of place in ethnic tourism villages. The research finds that the community tourism participation of the Langde Village villagers is represented primarily as “cooperative incentive type,” “self-mobilization type,” “mechanical passive type,” and “interest incentive type.” During the process of community tourism participation, villagers acquire a strong sense of place, which is represented entirely by the content structures of physical geography and humanistic physical environment, social and cultural characteristics, economic system, local identity, consanguinity identity, cultural identity, sense of house belonging, and convenience of life. The research also shows that we should not simply deem a positive relationship between community tourism participation and residents’ sense of place. In fact, residents’ sense of place shows a difference in the distinct forms of community tourism participation. It should, instead, be observed that there is a two-way interactive influential relationship between community tourism participation and residents’ sense of place. In particular, the perceptive factors of tourism benefits play an important mediating role.

Behavior anomie occurs periodically in the process of tourism activities, bringing about potential damages to tourism resources and the environment. Attribution bias theory is one of the classical theories used to explain human behavior. Exploring the factors of attribution bias behind the anomie of tourist behavior is a significant means of preventing it from happening. Based on the theory of attribution bias, this paper chooses seven potential variables and twenty-two observed variables to construct a structural equation model from the three perspectives of observer-actor bias, basic attribution bias, and self-serving bias, and conducts empirical research by obtaining data through questionnaires. The results show that attribution bias may directly lead to tourists’ psychological cognitive bias, which, in turn, may elicit tourist behavior anomie. Psychological environment and group psychology have a direct effect on the psychological cognitive bias and behavioral anomie of tourists. The article holds that authorities of tourism destinations can reduce the psychological cognitive bias of tourists by upgrading monitoring facilities, regulating the flow of tourists, reinforcing the negative results of deviant behavior, and exercising on-site visitor supervision, so as to minimize the deviant behavior of tourists.

With the development of the Internet, our understanding of festival image representation has become more diverse. However, most existing research regards tourists as the basic unit of analysis, which overlooks the diversity and complexity of participants in the construction of the festival image and fails to investigate the media image. This article takes the Yuexiu Temple Fair as a case study, selecting three key players with a much higher degree of involvement—organizers, participants, and the media—for research. The study analyzes information collected from interviews with the organizer and participant groups as well as from online media texts to explore the similarities and differences of the image representation of the festival's three key players. The study findings show that the Yuexiu Temple Fair's image representation comprises five dimensions: policy preferences, positioning, product planning, ambiance, and locality. The representation of the organizer can be regarded as the officially projected image, while the participant's representation is the perceived image of the Yuexiu Temple Fair. There is a specific difference between the projected image and the perceived image. The media plays the role of linking the organizers and participants, and the media image serves as a transitional image between the projected image and the perceived image. This study looks at various core elements horizontally and discusses the dimension of festival image representation, which is somewhat new and innovative in present festival image research. In addition, the study regards media as an independent subject of research, which is supplementary to the existing project-perception duality in the field of image research.

Tourism has long been characterized by visual experience activities. It is, therefore, important for tourism scholars to explore tourists’ visual interests and paths, as well as their subsequent influences, to improve the display of visual stimuli and identify tourists’ visual patterns. Restricted by the subjective bias in the self-report method, the question of how to shed light on tourists’ visual patterns objectively has become an important research topic to be solved urgently. The recent rapid development of eye-tracking techniques is paving the way for exploring people's internal minds and has attracted a great deal of attention from tourism scholars. In this context, this paper first introduces the physiological bases of eye-tracking and the development of eye-tracking techniques. It then reviews the development of eye-tracking studies in the fields of psychology and management. The paper further focuses on the progress and prospects of eye-tracking in the tourism field, finding that eye-tracking research has gained increasing interest. At present, eye-tracking research has mainly explored tourism marketing, tourism map design, tourists' spatial perception, and tourism resources evaluation. Finally, the paper discusses the proposed research framework and provides insightful suggestions for future tourism eye-tracking studies.