Web reputation of protected areas as tourism destinations: a case study

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons why tourist inflows in three Italian protected areas, endowed with valuable natural and cultural heritage, are below their potential. These sites participate in the European Regional Development Project EXCOVER, that aims at developing sustainable tourism in underrated Adriatic areas. To this goal, it is important to investigate the reputation of the sites among the general public, especially in the imaginary of people who have never visited it, to understand and change what keeps tourists away. This task is brought about through a semantic analysis of online reviews, that are crucial in the construction of non-visitors’ imaginary about a destination and influence travel choices. Customers’ reviews are scraped from TripAdvisor through a code written on-purpose. Topics are modelled through an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, chosen because a consolidated theoretical model of destination reputation is still missing, so reviews are allowed to tell what is relevant to reviewers, without prior constraints. Moreover, to the exploratory aim of this study, online opinions are not considered as answers to predetermined questions, but as free instances of word-of-mouth. The resulting proxies of web reputation are compared across time and space, to get the information needed to devise effective tourism development strategies and marketing initiatives. The originality of this contribution lays in the investigation of the web reputation of protected areas still to be developed into tourism destination. Moreover, it may provide some hint useful to the formulation of a solid theoretical model of destination reputation.