According to the UNWTO, in Europe, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, known as COVID-19, caused a 70% drop in the economy dependent on international tourism during 2020 and a slight recovery was registered in 2021. The expected recovery scheduled for 2022 may be slowed down by the war in Ukraine. At the restaurant level, only those companies that were able to adapt to the situation survived the pandemic, transforming their gastronomic offer towards take away, promoting their establishments on social networks and betting on digitization. In turn, because of the confinements and other mobility restrictions caused by the pandemic, new gastronomic experiences have appeared offered online by common collaborative hosting platforms such as Airbnb (Cenni & Vásquez, 2021a, 2021b), whose hosts offer experiences culinary companies that compete with traditional companies in the sector.

This situation, which not only affects our country, has left numerous tourist destinations in a very compromised situation. However, Spain has a wealth and gastronomic variety that makes it a differentiating element from other destinations, despite showing great deficiencies at the digital level, which is why the researchers of this GASTROTUR project consider that the digitization of the restaurant sector, and Its positioning as a gastronomic destination are strategies of great importance to promote Spanish DTIs and improve their image, both projected and perceived, being a great opportunity to transform some of the tourism growth models in our country and promote new ones, taking advantage of a development more sustainable, climate neutral and digital, aligned with the main priorities established by Europe.

The digitization and gastronomic positioning of Spanish tourist destinations will help promote their image, becoming a brand and identity of our country, generating tourist flows in line with an increasingly plural and heterogeneous demand made up of clients with a profile that not only seeks satiate the appetite but the enjoyment of the experience and aware of the impact that their activity causes on the territories in which it takes place.

In addition to the research vocation of the team to improve the Tourism industry in general, this project, based on a crisis, represents a great opportunity to apply the theoretical knowledge of the research team to real case studies that need to innovate and become digital. to overcome the harmful effects of the pandemic and/or improve their competitiveness. 

Since the pioneering work on the image of the city (Lynch, 1960), the study of the image of tourist destinations (TDI) has been constant up to the present, because the doctrine considers that it is determinant in the selection of the vacation spot (Pandey & Joshi, 2021). Conceptual models of TDI were published in the 1990s (Baloglu & McCleary, 1999; Echtner & Ritchie, 1993; Gartner, 1993) and have survived to this day. While numerous studies on gastronomy-related tourism experiences have been published (Lin et al., 2021), there is a lack of research on the importance and implications of gastronomy tourism on TDI (Sio et al., 2021). On the other hand, the numerous investigations on TDI have mostly relied on surveys and interviews as data sources (Yilmaz & Yilmaz, 2020). Likewise, in terms of the gastronomic image both projected (Daries et al., 2019) and perceived (Chang & Mak, 2018). However, members of the requesting team completed three quality investigations, directed respectively by the PIs of this GASTROTUR project, in line with solving said lack of research detected (Sio et al., 2021), on the importance of the gastronomic image: (1) Among the few studies that have used massive UGC data as a source to elucidate the perceived gastronomic image, it is worth highlighting a study based on 500,000 online travel reviews (OTRs) (Marine-Roig et al., 2019), shared on the TripAdvisor portal by customers of 7,558 restaurants in the Canary Islands. (2) In relation to the projected gastronomic image, a study on the level of maturity of the websites of 980 Michelin restaurants in France, Italy and Spain stands out (Daries et al., 2018). (3) Regarding the economic profitability of the projected and perceived gastronomic image, an investigation carried out on high-level catering stands out, identifying the variables that affect the profitability of 206 Michelin star restaurants in Spain, highlighting the importance of the media and communication, in a field in which men achieve more professional success than women (Daries et al., 2021).

A member of this team was one of the pioneer researchers in claiming the UGC as a data source to analyze perceived TDI and presented this line of research at the TURITEC conference (Marine-Roig, 2010), through the INNOVATUR national plan project (CSO2008-01699/GEOG), and developed it in his doctorate as part of the national project GLOBALTUR (CSO2011-23004/GEOG), both financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. Recently, the book "Women's voices in tourism research" published a synthesis of this line of research (Marine-Roig, 2021a). Currently, many researchers use UGC as a data source to analyze perceived TDI, but most use a classic destination image model (Gartner, 1993) and focus on reviews of attractions, hotels, and restaurants ( Marine-Roig, 2022).

In the last two decades, the sources of TDIs have changed dramatically, with the growth of social media platforms for the dissemination of images and with tourists consulting more often tourist and traveler generated content (TGC). TGC can be defined as narratives, opinions, pictures, audio-visual files, and ratings shared on social media and based on visitors' experiences of travelling, sightseeing, entertaining, shopping, lodging and dining in tourist destinations (Marine-Roig, 2022). . Within the TGC, the OTRs stand out for their abundance. For example, the travel-related website TripAdvisor currently hosts around 1 billion reviews and comments. Therefore, the relevance of TGC is evident as it constitutes a novel unsolicited organic agent that forms TDIs (Marine-Roig, 2019, 2021b). Indeed, it reflects the image perceived by visitors and consulted by other travelers, thus contributing to the image as a gestalt, from a holistic perspective, represented by a hermeneutic circle of image formation through induced, autonomous and organic agents.

Tourism has a high semiotic content (Culler, 1981). Semioticians examine people's interpretation of signs (Brijs et al., 2011), and this may be of interest in tourism research, as text and images shared on social media represent semiotic aspects. of the images perceived by tourists. In fact, when a tourist photographs a landmark, such as the Cibeles Fountain in Madrid or the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona, they not only capture a physical structure but also an icon, a symbol of the tourist destination. Likewise, sharing images of typical dishes, informative posters of local routes or even tickets that give access to popular attractions on social media is another expression of the relevance of semiotics (Lojo et al., 2020). However, despite the fact that signs and symbols are universally applicable (Morris, 1946; Peirce, 1935) and have considerable weight in the fields of branding and marketing (Mick et al., 2004), studies rarely of tourism have approached semiotics as an integral part of TDI, which may mean a paradigm shift in research on TDI.

Semiotics is the science that studies signs, their meaning and use. The first studies on semiotics go back to the time of ancient Greece (Oehler, 1987). In contemporary times, philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Charles William Morris stand out in this field. Peirce affirmed that all thought is in signs and questioned whether people could think without signs (Peirce, 1935). Morris was also clear that any human action without signs, processes, and evaluations is unthinkable (Morris, 1938, 1946).According to the postulates of both semiologists, the application of signs is universal.

Several researchers have demonstrated the close relationship between semiotics, branding, marketing, and consumer behavior (Mick, 1986; Mick et al., 2004). However, research on semiotics in the field of tourism and hospitality was rare two decades ago (Echtner, 1999) and remains scarce: two studies based on Peirce's triad (Echtner, 1999; Pennington & Thomsen, 2010) and one that uses the denotative and connotative signs of Barthes' visual semiotics (Hunter, 2016). As for Morris's work, there is no direct application in the field of TDI. However, in their behaviour, tourists are the agents of semiotics: around the world they are engaged in reading cities, landscapes and cultures as sign systems (Culler, 1981, 1989), and a semiotic approach can help companies industry and destination marketing and management organizations (DMOs) to better understand their behavior and (co)design according to the experiences, marketing strategies and optimization of available resources.

Morris (1938, 1946) defined semiotics as a general science that includes syntactics (sign-sign), semantics (sign-object) and pragmatics (sign-interpretant) and their interrelationships. Derived from Morris' trichotomies, the investigations of this team (Lin et al., 2022a, 2022b; Marine-Roig, 2021b) show the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of the semiotic model proposed to analyze TDI:

The designative aspect of the model comprises knowledge of the physical attributes of the destination and tourism-related services situated both in time and place. It includes the physical structure or tangible or intangible form (configuration) and the facilities (characteristics or amenities) of the resources of the tourist destination. For example, this aspect includes the physical attributes scale items (Echtner & Ritchie, 1993).

The evaluative aspect includes the appreciation of known tourist resources, through the affective and evaluative dimensions. The affective dimension measures the feelings and moods of tourists in relation to the resources they have known in the designative phase. The evaluative dimension rates the resources using a standard scale that goes from the worst to the best score.

The prescriptive aspect represents the response of tourists to the two previous stimuli, which can be behavioral (eg, intention to visit the place again) or demonstrate attitudinal (dis)loyalty (eg, recommend or discourage the visit). to the place). Through the estimative use, the evaluative aspect reveals the satisfaction of the tourists, while the inciting use of the prescriptive aspect allows deducing their loyalty in relation to the resources of the tourist destination. Finally, the semantic dimensions of the model are hierarchically interrelated (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1993). For example, potential visitors and tourists cannot value what they do not know, nor can they recommend what they have not known or valued.

While the model allows for TDI analysis with survey data, it is designed to take full advantage of TGC sharing on social media. Thus, the TGC and the web hosting platforms are integrated into the online tourism and hospitality ecosystem through electronic word of mouth (eWoM). This data source includes information about the three phases of action (ie, orientation, manipulation, and completion) delimited within the behavioral continuum because it represents a beginning and an end (Posner, 1987). For example, OTRs for tourist attractions may include information on what tourists have visited or revisited, when and where, how they have rated it, whether they intend to repeat the visit, and whether they have recommended or discouraged it to other tourists. (Guo et al., 2021; Marine-Roig, 2022). OTRs can be considered story-based narratives, which are much more persuasive than rational or logic-based communications (Fisher, 1987).

Consequently, an adaptation (Lin et al., 2022a, 2022b) of the conceptual model based on the semiotic aspects of IDDs (Marine-Roig, 2021b) is used in the context of this research to exploit the TGC on gastronomic experiences in the DTIs. The applicable results arise through various comparisons between the gastronomic image perceived by users, consumers or clients of gastronomic activities and that projected by DMOs and companies in the sector. The model provides for the segmentation of these experiences by time and place. It is also possible to segment by gender in the event that the users of the experiences and the managers of the establishments have said quality available on the business website or on their social media profile.