The building blocks of regenerative tourism and hospitality: a text-mining approach

ABSTRACT

Regenerative tourism and hospitality (RTH) offer the industry a robust transformational potential as a further step toward sustainability thinking and development. This study aims to scrutinize regenerative tourism and hospitality from the suppliers’ perspective. We selected industrial media contents posted by tourism and hospitality suppliers on the regenerative approach. Drawing on Heider's balance theory, we combined two textual mining techniques (content and sentiment analysis) in order to decrypt the suppliers’ perspective of RTH. Our research identified a set of key dimensions for deciphering RTH, namely (1) sustainability, (2) harmonized communities, (3) resources restoration, (4) carbon-offsetting, and (5) energy saving. The findings can help practitioners advance, follow the shift from sustainable to regenerative tourism and hospitality, as well as help suppliers shape the tourism and hospitality sector’s future. Despite RTH’s significance, there is scant research on its development, marketing potential and promotion. This work therefore serves as an important examination of the RTH.

KEYWORDS:

• Regenerative tourism and hospitality
• dimensions
• sentiment analysis
• text analytics
• Leximancer

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The World We Want, NEOMA Business School: [Grant Number 414603].