The main aspects of the experience economy in tourism industry

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify the influence of experience economy factors (entertainment, education, aesthetics, escapism) and the economic component on preferences in choosing hotels in the domestic tourism industry. The empirical base of the study includes 30,926 reviews from the tripadvisor.ru website for 1,243 hotels in Russia for 2021–2022, divided by consumer ratings. The research methodology includes textual analysis of tourist reviews: counting particular words and phrases in reviews, calculating the correlation of words, finding word relationships using the word2vec embedding matrix, highlighting the most popular topics of discussion based on the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) method and assessing sentiment using a BERT transformer network. The results of this study assess aspects of the basic model of the experience economy (aesthetics, escapism, entertainment and education) and adapt the model for the domestic tourism and hospitality industry, adding relevant aspects (recommendations and economics). Based on the results of a quantitative assessment of aspects of the extended model of the experience economy, it was revealed that the aesthetic aspect is decisive for people when evaluating hotels, and the aspects of entertainment and education, expressed indirectly, although they are of high importance, but not as much as aesthetic parameters. The economic component, primarily the price-quality ratio and the overall assessment of the cost, also stands out in the main topics, however, hotel reviews focus on it to a lesser extent. This is the first time in Russia that such a study is evaluating aspects of the experience economy model for the tourism industry and will allow developing the travel market in Russia.