Due to the accelerated adoption of Web 2.0 technology, increasingly number of tourists share and exchange travel-related information through reviews, photos, and videos on the Internet. Previous studies show that this tourist-generated content (TGC) can affect tourists’ choice of destination and can shape the online destination image (DI) (Litvin et al., 2008; Volo, 2010). Therefore, destination marketers need to know what the DI is on the Internet and whether such a DI is consistent with the image promoted by the destination itself, thus allowing them to decide whether it is necessary to counter unfavourable images or reinforce positive images on the Internet. This study investigates how the destination image (DI) of Macau changed during the period of 2014 to 2019 from inbound tourists’ perspective based on user-generated content on a mainstream travel website. Macau was chosen as a case study destination for this empirical research. Macau’s tourism enjoyed rapid growth since the Macau government opened bidding for casino concessions in 2002. Since 2007 until now, Macau is the No.1 gaming capital in the word (in terms of gaming revenue) for 12 years in a row. The Macau Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that visitor arrivals of Macau totaled about 40 million in 2019. In the study, web crawlers developed by Python were employed to collect inbound tourists’ reviews from Ctrip regarding the theme of ‘Macau attraction’. A total of 41,000+ reviews (including 110,000+ key terms) from Ctrip (the largest online travel agency in China) were collected and analysed using the text-mining technique.