IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/prbchp/978-3-032-23925-9_29.html

Can Travel Motivations be Identified from User-Generated Content?

In: Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2026

Author

Listed:
  • Muqiu Du

    (University of Eastern Finland)

  • Juho Pesonen

    (University of Eastern Finland)

  • Raffaele Filieri

    (Audencia Business School)

Abstract

User-generated content (UGC) is widely used in tourism research to understand tourists, particularly regarding their satisfaction. Understanding travel motivations is one of the cornerstones of tourism research and marketing practices. However, travel motivations have rarely been examined through UGC. This study examines Work Exchange Sharing Accommodation (WESA), an alternative travel form where travellers trade labour for lodging. Using 57,757 WESA traveller profiles worldwide as a UGC dataset, we systematically and unobtrusively explore WESA travellers’ motivations through a mixed-methods design that combines qualitative coding with topic modelling. The results show that travel motivations can indeed be identified from UGC using the proposed methodology. WESA travellers’ motivations are predominantly people-oriented. Beyond personal desires for social and cultural exchange, self-development, and enjoyable life experiences, they also exhibit distinctive altruistic aspirations through community involvement and contributions. This study makes a significant methodological contribution by demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating mixed methods with large-scale UGC analysis to capture traveller motivations with greater precision. Practically, it offers valuable insights for WESA hosts, platform providers and policymakers to better address the alternative needs of contemporary tourism.

Suggested Citation

  • Muqiu Du & Juho Pesonen & Raffaele Filieri, 2026. "Can Travel Motivations be Identified from User-Generated Content?," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Peter O'Connor & Mattia Rainoldi & Julia Neidhardt (ed.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2026, chapter 29, pages 431-443, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-032-23925-9_29
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-23925-9_29
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-032-23925-9_29. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.