Tourist Perceptions of Authentic Travel in South Korea: A Text Mining Analysis of Online Travel Comments

This study examines how tourists perceive and describe authentic travel experiences in South Korea through text mining of online travel comments. Unlike survey-based studies that measure authenticity using predetermined scales, this study explores tourists’ spontaneously expressed perceptions in naturally occurring online discussions. The dataset comprised 10,000 English-language travel comments about destinations and tourism experiences in South Korea. The comments were analyzed using keyword frequency, co-occurrence analysis, sentiment analysis, and thematic coding, focusing on local culture, traditional experiences, food, interactions with residents, natural environments, commercialization, and tourist congestion. The findings indicate that authenticity was frequently associated with local food, traditional culture, interactions with residents, and less-commercialized places. Conversely, commercialization and overcrowding were linked to negative perceptions of authenticity. These findings suggest that tourists construct authenticity not only through historical or cultural characteristics but also through perceptions of whether experiences feel local, distinctive, personal, and relatively unaffected by mass tourism. The study demonstrates the potential of text mining to examine tourist perceptions through naturally generated online travel content.