Tourism-philia versus tourism-phobia: residents and destination management organization’s publicly expressed tourism perceptions in Barcelona

The current research on hosts’ perceptions of tourism has focused on survey-based studies, proving their heterogeneity at the moment of the study, but lacking to present any evolution over time. This paper aims to show if, and how, hosts’ public narratives of tourism have changed in the particular case of the city of Barcelona (Spain) from 2004 to 2015, analyzing any common and opposing points of their argumentation as they may change over time. These narratives represent the perspectives of two opposing groups of hosts: residents and destination management organizations (DMOs). We used thematic analysis to portray their public discourse, as expressed in the residents’ magazine Carrer, and the annual reports of Turisme de Barcelona. Through the analysis of common and opposing points of their argumentation, our findings show a clear division between the residents’ tourism-phobic perception and the DMO’s tourism-philic one, which appears to change their structure over time, going from complete opposites to searching for common ground when tourism is addressed as part of the city’s identity by both sides.