Topic Modeling for Hiking Trail Online Reviews: Analysis of the Mutianyu Great Wall

Ziye Shang and Jian Ming Luo
Additional contact information
Ziye Shang: Faculty of International Tourism and Management, City University of Macau, Macau 999078, China
Jian Ming Luo: Faculty of International Tourism and Management, City University of Macau, Macau 999078, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-16

Abstract: Hiking is now one of the most popular activities amongst adventure travelers. Although recent studies have highlighted the differences between Chinese adventure tourists and their international counterparts, few studies have comprehensively explored the differences in hikers’ interests and concerns for experience elements between these two groups. Topic modeling is adopted for an analysis of the online reviews of the Mutianyu Great Wall to identify attributes influencing hikers’ experiences and behavior. Using a large-scale review dataset, the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) technique was applied to construct a comprehensive list of the topics posted by hikers. The findings revealed that Chinese and non-Chinese hikers have common concerns regarding the degree of challenges, scenery, tour services and crowding during hiking. Nevertheless, their perceptions of cultural resources are presented in a different way. These findings are beneficial for understanding the similarities and differences between Chinese and non-Chinese hikers’ perceptions, in addition to improving domestic and international markets’ management and marketing strategies.

Keywords: hiking; topic modeling; tourism experience; Great Wall; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/6/3246/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/6/3246/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:6:p:3246-:d:768100

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().