Sustainable Tourist Satisfaction in Art Museums: Identifying Attributes That Enhance Visitor Experience for Sustainable Cultural Management

Art museums play a critical role in sustaining cultural heritage, promoting lifelong learning, and supporting sustainable urban and tourism development. In this study, we identify the key attributes of art museums that shape visitor satisfaction and clarify how each attribute contributes to satisfaction or dissatisfaction. By drawing on the Kano model, we argue that not all attributes play the same role in influencing visitor evaluations, which holds important implications for the sustainable management of cultural institutions. To empirically test this, we analyze user-generated online reviews from a major immersive museum in South Korea using a two-stage approach: first, the main experiential attributes were extracted through topic modeling; second, the relationship between topic mentions and overall review ratings was evaluated through regression analysis. The findings reveal eight core attributes of the art museum experience, with one functioning as a satisfier and the others as dissatisfiers, demonstrating the asymmetric effects proposed by the Kano model. This study contributes to sustainability research in hospitality and tourism by conceptualizing art museums as service products with distinct attribute structures and by showing how optimized management of these attributes can strengthen the long-term sustainability of cultural tourism destinations. Practically, our results provide guidance for museum managers on which attributes require strategic prioritization to enhance visitor satisfaction and support sustainable operational practices.