Listen to the Voices from Tourists: Evaluation of Wetland Ecotourism Satisfaction Using an Online Reviews Mining Approach

Abstract

Scientific evaluation of tourist satisfaction could contribute to the sustainable development of wetland ecotourism. With the development of Web 2.0, online travel reviews increase significantly which provide valuable information for evaluating tourist satisfaction. Hence, this study aims to evaluate the tourist satisfaction of wetland ecotourism in Zhalong National Nature Reserve (ZNNR) based on online travel reviews. Tourist satisfaction evaluation model and sentiment analysis were applied to calculate satisfactions of evaluation factors that were uncovered based on latent dirichlet allocation model. The results suggest that total satisfaction was 0.614, at the fundamentally satisfied level. Moreover, we identified 11 controllable evaluation factors that were key for ZNNR to manage interaction with tourists, and further aggregated these factors into three categories: ecotourism experience, natural resource and cultural resource. Especially, importance-performance analysis further identified the most important evaluation factors according to four-quadrant weight-satisfaction matrix. The proposed analytical framework expands the understanding of the methodological challenges and offers novel perspectives for evaluating the tourist satisfaction. These findings could provide useful insights for the sustainable development of ecotourism and effective management of wetlands.