Recuperation travel in China: its operating model and opportunities for tourism entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Employer subsidized ‘recuperation travel’ has emerged in China as a workplace bonus operating predominantly in the public sector. As a novel and emerging tourism model, the potential for recuperation travel could reach as high as 250 million clients, which warrants greater attention from both practitioners and academicians. This paper sheds new insight into recuperation travel in China, through a sentiment analysis of social media posts by both recuperation travel participants and non-participants. The results suggest that most recuperation travel participants (77.6%) expressed positive sentiment, compared with 41.3% of non-participants. This paper identifies and discusses the entrepreneurial opportunities that can be derived from this billion-dollar tourism market.

KEYWORDS:

• Recuperation travel
• sentiment analysis
• tourism entrepreneurship
• natural language processing
• word cloud

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).