Perspective from Chinese Tourists: Study on Urban Tourism Experience of Seoul City Based on Online Travel Notes

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a serious impact on the tourism of Seoul, which is deeply dependent on international tourists. It is now more crucial than ever to make preparation for tourism recovery. Hence, this study took the travel notes posted by Chinese tourists in Seoul as a data source and applied manual content analysis to encode urban tourism experience (UTE) elements from travel notes, scoring them one by one and, consequently, obtaining the Seoul UTE element structure table. On this basis, the paper used social network analysis (SNA) and modified “importance–performance” analysis (MIPA), which complement each other, to thoroughly analyze the structural characteristics of elements and experience quality. The content analysis concludes that the Seoul UTE includes twenty-eight elements; SNA analysis shows that the network structure has high internal coordination and that UTE elements present aggregation with an indication of obvious differentiation of tourist sources; MIPA analysis reveals that overall experience quality is high, and an evaluation of traditional elements such as shopping and catering found them to be good; however, the evaluation of some core elements is low. With the help of our findings, it is hoped that this study can provide a better understanding and mastery of Chinese tourists’ demands and experiences to further improve tourism competitiveness for the industry’s recovery after post-COVID-19.