The Digital Footprint of Walking Tourism: A Spatio-Textual Analysis of Tourist Perceptions on Coastal Trails

With growing interest in health and leisure, walking tourism has emerged as a significant segment of the tourism market. Coastal trails have gained prominence as attractive tourist attractions offering unique experiences that combine coastal and forest environments. Understanding the experiences of tourists using these trails is essential to their sustainability and the revitalization of nearby regions and tourist destinations. However, the sustainable management of coastal trails and the understanding of the perceptions and evaluations of tourists using them remain limited. Therefore, this study aims to analyze walking tourism experiences on coastal trails using online review data to identify tourists’ perceptions and evaluations. Three representative coastal trails in South Korea were selected as the study sites, and 21,289 reviews (including course information, titles, review content, and posting dates) were collected from Durunubi, a walking tourism application operated by the Korea Tourism Organization. The research methodology employed text mining and sentiment analysis in Python 3.12.13 and spatial analysis using GeoDa 1.22.0.20 and QGIS 3.40.11. This study explores the emotional geography of walking tourism experiences along Korean coastal trails by integrating the analysis of online review data using text mining, sentiment analysis, and spatial analysis. The analysis revealed that positive sentiments were associated with natural landscapes, while negative sentiments were associated with trail management. These emotional experiences exhibit distinct spatial clustering patterns. This finding has important implications for establishing sustainable trail management strategies.