Echoes of the Coast: Decoding Ecotourism Narratives in Online Reviews

Kasargod Pattanshetty Sandhya Rao, Shilpa Praveen (), Pooja Karkala and Anshuman Mohanty
Additional contact information
Kasargod Pattanshetty Sandhya Rao: Nitte (Deemed to be University), Justice KS Hegde Institute of Management (JKSHIM), Nitte 574110, India
Shilpa Praveen: T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal 576104, India
Pooja Karkala: Nitte (Deemed to be University), Justice KS Hegde Institute of Management (JKSHIM), Nitte 574110, India
Anshuman Mohanty: Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune 411014, India

Tourism and Hospitality, 2025, vol. 6, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: This study aims to investigate how tourists articulate their ecotourism experiences through online reviews of coastal Karnataka. As one of India’s most favored domestic destinations since the 1960s, coastal Karnataka is renowned for its scenic shoreline, unique biodiversity, and diverse ecotourism experiences along a 320 km stretch of the Arabian-Sea rim spanning across the Uttara Kannada, Udupi, and Dakshina Kannada districts. Despite the growing popularity of ecotourism and sustainable travel, limited research has examined how tourists share ecotourism concepts via online reviews. Employing content analysis through the Leximancer tool, this study examines 1843 online reviews from 80 eco-resorts and homestays listed on TripAdvisor ® to identify emerging themes from interconnected concepts and assess the extent to which ecotourism values are reflected. The findings highlight several themes out of which “place”, “food”, “resort”, and “rooms” were the dominant ones. Notably, this study also revealed minimal references to coastal conservation or sustainability. The analysis offers several theoretical contributions to the ecotourism literature by demonstrating the implication of construal level theory (CLT) and the use of Leximancer in analyzing large-scale travel data. This study also provides meaningful insights for the tourism service providers to use online review data to enrich tourist experiences and outlines actionable strategies for strengthening the visibility of coastal conservation efforts and promote ecotourism advocacy.

Keywords: coastal ecotourism; user-generated content; online travel reviews; sustainable tourism; construal level theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z3 Z30 Z31 Z32 Z33 Z38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5768/6/4/161/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5768/6/4/161/ (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:jtourh:v:6:y:2025:i:4:p:161-:d:1731977

Access Statistics for this article

Tourism and Hospitality is currently edited by Mr. Philip Li

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