Reframed image congruence: Insights from attractions

While prior studies on destination image congruence have mainly focused on the tourist–supplier perspective and assumed linear effects, this study extends the scope by incorporating inter-tourist alignment and examining its asymmetric influence on tourists' emotional evaluations. Tourist reviews and promotional messages from TripAdvisor were analyzed using a pretrained transformer model to compute semantic similarity across diverse tourist attractions. Regression models tested the nonlinear effects of both congruence types. The results show an inverted U-shaped relationship for tourist–supplier congruence and a consistently positive convex relationship for inter-tourist congruence. The effect of inter-tourist congruence is further strengthened by review recency. The study provides practical implications for strategically managing user-generated content and optimizing destination marketing strategies.