Hiking experience attributes and seasonality: an analysis of topic modelling

ABSTRACT

Hiking tourism is an essential means of destination development. A holistic understanding of the hiking experience could benefit destination management. This study adopted topic modelling and an online review-based approach to determine the key attributes of hiking tourism in the context of seasonality. Data were collected from TripAdvisor and a comprehensive list of the attributes, discussed by hikers when visiting Dragon’s Back Trail in Hong Kong, is constructed and categorized into five aspects. Insights into the hikers’ interests and concerns about the experience attributes across seasons are revealed. The results show that the concerns for some attributes are more sensitive in specific seasons compared with other attributes. Precisely, this study found that seasonality has heterogeneous effects on hikers’ experience. The results are beneficial to support local hiking tourism marketing and hedging strategies for different seasons.

KEYWORDS:

• Hiking
• experience attributes
• seasonality
• online review
• topic modelling

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.