Topic Modeling for Hiking Trail Online Reviews: Analysis of the Mutianyu Great Wall

Abstract

Hiking is now one of the most popular activities amongst adventure travelers. Although recent studies have highlighted the differences between Chinese adventure tourists and their international counterparts, few studies have comprehensively explored the differences in hikers’ interests and concerns for experience elements between these two groups. Topic modeling is adopted for an analysis of the online reviews of the Mutianyu Great Wall to identify attributes influencing hikers’ experiences and behavior. Using a large-scale review dataset, the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) technique was applied to construct a comprehensive list of the topics posted by hikers. The findings revealed that Chinese and non-Chinese hikers have common concerns regarding the degree of challenges, scenery, tour services and crowding during hiking. Nevertheless, their perceptions of cultural resources are presented in a different way. These findings are beneficial for understanding the similarities and differences between Chinese and non-Chinese hikers’ perceptions, in addition to improving domestic and international markets’ management and marketing strategies.