Abstract
AbstractOnline sustainability communication attracts a considerable attention in tourism research. This study focuses on sustainability communication in official destination websites for informing and motivating visitors to adopt sustainable practices and behaviors. To advance previous research in this area, it adopts a web content mining approach to assess the characteristics of online contents of a sample of 20 Italian cultural destinations. The main dimensions and typologies of sustainability-oriented practices in tourism are used as basis to develop a text classifier for the automated content analysis. A total of 2.975 web pages from official city websites and official tourism promotion websites of the destinations is analyzed through this approach to investigate the online contents relating to the environmental, economic, socio-cultural and general dimensions sustainability as well as their emotional appeal. The analysis reveals that about 15.8% of total online texts contains information to promote sustainability-oriented behaviors at the destination. It indicates that the communication is more specifically focused on environmental/economic/socio-cultural practices than generically referring to sustainable/responsible tourism. However, in line with previous research, it highlights that destinations do not sufficiently balance these pillars in their online communication. Further, the websites’ texts scarcely leverage the persuasive potential of affective appealing messages. The implications of this automated approach for improving the design of online sustainability-related contents are also discussed.
Highlights
One of the greatest challenges for sustainable tourism development is to encourage tourists to adopt sustainable behaviors in order to minimize the negative impacts of tourism on host communities, cultural heritage and the environment while providing its positive contribution to local economies [1–3]
With respect to research based on manual approaches, it adopts an automated approach for analyzing the communication provided by official destination websites to inform about and motivate sustainable choices and practices by visitors
This study presents a web content mining analysis based on natural language processing (NLP) with a total set of 2.975 web pages by the official websites of the top 20 competitive Italian cultural destinations
Summary
One of the greatest challenges for sustainable tourism development is to encourage tourists to adopt sustainable behaviors in order to minimize the negative impacts of tourism on host communities, cultural heritage and the environment while providing its positive contribution to local economies [1–3]. In this direction, destination marketing and communications tools can be used to influence tourists’ decision-making and purchasing behaviors for more sustainable choices and practices [4, 5]. With respect to research based on manual approaches, it adopts an automated approach for analyzing the communication provided by official destination websites to inform about and motivate sustainable choices and practices by visitors. Whereas web automated analysis may not be appropriate to evaluate the audience impact of sustainability communication [15], it presents several benefits by allowing to analyze thousands of online texts in a speedy and accurate way and to reduce subjective interpretation in coding [14]
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