سحر موحدی

Nowadays, the generated and shared content on tourist perceptions in social media is considered a fresh and far-reaching way to introduce the concept of the destination image. Destination decision-makers attempt to use this content to provide a deep understanding of tourism supply and demand. Marketers have to be particular about it when defining a proper destination image. In this regard, many researchers have emphasized the importance of using social media to tap into tourists’ perceptions of destination because it not only helps to deepen the administrators’ understanding of the demands of this type of tourism and to propose new approaches to determine the customers’ preferences in destination marketing but also directs new products and services to satisfy the tourists to a greater extent. Depending on the type of tourism, the contexts and criteria for this kind of virtual investigation are different. For example, in cultural destinations, tourists’ perceptions of tangible and intangible cultural heritage and services and products offered in virtual contexts are regarded as a tool to assess the tourists’ perceptions of that destination. The present study assumes that a holistic approach toward the analysis of tourist perception in the virtual sphere could be a well-qualified alternative to determine tourists’ wants in cultural destinations. Content analysis, which is a practical method in analyzing visual and textual data and  therefore is quite pertinent to the analysis of tourist perceptions, was adopted as the data analysis instrument in this study. To collect the data, two frequently-visited and widely-used websites with easy access to tourists’ comments, namely TripAdvisor and Flickr , were selected so that tourists’ experiences and perceptions could be gathered more authentically and conveniently. The findings demonstrated that the analysis of perceived authenticity of cultural destinations in Iran could provide the content required to create a destination image for purposeful marketing in Iran. Perceived Authenticity was categorized into three main themes: emotional, sensational, and rational.

As a symbol of the Islamic spiritual economy, Waqf has been always present and alive in all aspects of the Islamic countries, and it has attracted the attentions of many researchers of different fields due to its multidimensional functional. Based on their desire for eternity, they defined Waqf in terms of a proverb saying “I benefit from whatever I endow”. In several tourists’ travelogues such as travelogues by Nasir Khusraw, Jean Chardin, etc. has mentioned this spiritual tradition as a humanistic economy showing the effects of Waqf on perceiving the tourist destination. Since the modern generation of tourists look for new experiences, thus obtaining a rich content of this spiritual heritage can satisfy them and help the promotion of humanistic models of economy such as Waqf . In terms of its objective, this is a practical research, and it is descriptive-analytical based on its data collection method. The results are obtained in meta-synthesis of documents, articles and travelogues relation to the Waqf tradition. Indeed, the main objective of this article is to provide the mentioned introduction, promotion and reinforcement to understand the different aspects of Waqf tradition based on the travelogues in order to reinforce the perceived value by the tourists of Iranian cities so that the modeling of these concepts leads to the promotion of this spiritual economy model among the other cultures. The results show that considering the perceivable aspects of Waqf , this intangible heritage can be introduced to the tourists in terms of four main aspects including the emotional, cognitive, functional and social aspects and to promote this spiritual heritage based on the religious background of tourists at the international level with regard to the environmental-humanistic aspects of economy; as in Iranian culture, it is believed that “give bread to everyone who enters this house and don’t ask his faith, because the one who deserves a life for god, deserves a bread for us”.