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Article

Emotional Well-Being in Tourism Experiences on Pathways: Evidence from User-Generated Content

by
Alessandra Marasco
1 and
Valentina Marchi
2,*
1
Institute of Heritage Science, National Research Council of Italy (ISPC-CNR), Via Cardinale Guglielmo Sanfelice, 80134 Napoli, Italy
2
Institute of BioEconomy, National Research Council (IBE-CNR), Via Madonna del Piano, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2026, 18(10), 5072; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105072
Submission received: 31 March 2026 / Revised: 30 April 2026 / Accepted: 13 May 2026 / Published: 18 May 2026
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Nature-Based Tourism)
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Abstract

Within the contemporary debate on tourism, sustainability and well-being, increasing attention has been devoted to the role of cultural and nature-based tourism experiences on pathways for human transformation and well-being. This study contributes to this emerging area of research by analyzing the emotional well-being associated with travellers’ experiences on Italian pathways through an automated text-mining approach based on their online reviews on TripAdvisor. Through an analysis of reviews relating to 10 pathways, it improves the understanding of how emotional well-being emerges from reviews, their linguistic structure and how the main experiential factors are associated with positive and negative emotions experienced by travellers. The findings provide evidence of the association of these experiences with emotional well-being, show how well-being emerges in relation to the dimensions of challenge, community and escape during the journey on the pathway, and identify distinct linguistic styles in reviews associated with well-being.

1. Introduction

Tourism research has been devoting increasing attention to the transformative role of tourism and its positive impact on human flourishing and well-being [1,2,3]. The Beyond GDP approach is relevant for addressing the contemporary challenges of tourism development and guiding tourism destinations’ sustainability [4].
Research in this area has addressed the conceptualisation of tourist well-being, including hedonic and eudaimonic dimensions, and the relationship between tourism experiences and well-being in a variety of tourism contexts [5,6,7].
In the past decade, growing interest has been devoted to the well-being effects of route-based experiences in natural and cultural contexts, as a form of tourism with relevant benefits for the sustainable development of territories as well as the self-transformation of travellers [8,9,10].
Research on the positive effects of these experiences integrates different perspectives relating to pilgrimages, slow tourism and green exercise [11] and provides evidence of their impact on different dimensions of inner transformation and well-being (a.o., [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]).
Given their embeddedness in natural and rural environments, such experiences can be situated within the broader literature on human–nature relationships, which over the last decade has examined how individuals relate to and experience nature, and how variations in environmental contexts may shape well-being, nature connection and pro-environmental orientations [21,22].
Against this background, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of the emotional well-being of travellers’ experiences on pathways by leveraging the potential of user-generated content (UGC), in line with recent studies highlighting the potential of big data as an alternative source for well-being measurement [23,24], including within tourism research [25]. Notwithstanding the growing interest in the well-being effects of experiences on pathways, there is still limited research on the analysis of travellers’ self-reports of well-being through online reviews.
On this basis, this study aims to advance previous research by examining how the emotional well-being of travellers on Italian pathways is expressed in their online reviews on TripAdvisor through an automated text mining approach. Specifically, it aims to address the following research questions:
  • How does emotional well-being emerge in travellers’ self-accounts of experiences on pathways expressed in their reviews?
  • Which linguistic structure characterizes travellers’ reviews associated with emotional well-being?
  • How are the main experiential factors associated with well-being communicated by travellers in their reviews?
The use of TripAdvisor is relevant for the study’s purpose, considering the widespread use of this platform among pilgrims and the highly emotive nature of their online reviews [26]. Beyond their relevance to tourism studies, such data-driven approaches can also contribute to sustainability-oriented research by capturing how individuals perceive and emotionally respond to environmental contexts. By exploring emotional well-being through travellers’ spontaneous narratives, this study contributes to understanding how environmental features, social interactions and territorial contexts interact in shaping subjective experiences. In doing so, it provides insights that may inform sustainability-oriented management and planning of nature-based tourism contexts.

2. Theoretical Background

2.1. Subjective Well-Being and Its Measurement Through Big Data

Subjective well-being (SWB) refers to how people subjectively evaluate their lives and has been defined as ‘an umbrella term for different valuations that people make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds and the circumstances in which they live’ [27] (p. 153). According to its most common definition, SWB includes cognitive as well as affective components, whereby the cognitive component is captured by life satisfaction, while the affective component is measured by the experience of positive affect and the absence of negative affect [28]. The definition of SWB proposed in the OECD guidelines [29] includes three constituent components, notably: (a) life evaluation, which is a reflective assessment on a person’s life or some specific aspect of it; (b) affect, i.e., the description of a person’s feelings or emotional states, including two hedonic dimensions of positive affect (i.e., happiness, joy and contentment) and negative affect (sadness, anger, fear and anxiety); (c) eudaimonia, which focuses on functioning and the realization of a person’s potential, involving elements such as a sense of purpose, meaning, autonomy, competence, and self-actualisation. In the framework developed by the New Economic Foundation [30] (p. 18), well-being is conceived as “a dynamic state, in which the individual is able to develop their potential, work productively and creatively, build strong and positive relationships with others, and contribute to the community” and is measured through indicators relating to personal well-being, social well-being and well-being at work. Personal well-being is articulated into five main components: (1) emotional well-being, relating to the overall balance between the frequency of experiencing positive and negative emotions; (2) a satisfying life; (3) vitality; (4) resilience and self-esteem (including self-esteem, optimism, resilience); (5) positive functioning, including autonomy, competence, engagement, meaning and purpose in life.
The contemporary debate on SBW includes the exploration of new areas and approaches in its measurement, including the use of big data from social media platforms [24]. While not replacing traditional self-report measures of SWB, big data represent a useful additional source for research on SWB [23], allowing researchers to rely on spontaneous preferences, concerns and experiences rather than answers to predefined questions [31]. Several studies have analyzed SWB through publicly available databases (e.g., Twitter, Google, Facebook), using various approaches regarding sources of data, levels of measurement and aspects of SWB [23]. According to the review by Luhmann [23], digital traces (mostly user-generated texts) are analyzed using either a closed vocabulary approach or an open-vocabulary approach, with the former mostly using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software as a predefined dictionary and focusing on the positive and negative emotion words and dimensions. This review highlights that analyses based on open-vocabulary approaches present greater predictive validity than closed-vocabulary-based studies. Further, it is noted that satisfactory predictive models for life satisfaction are still absent, whereas the analysis of emotion-related contents predicts emotional well-being adequately. A recent review of the literature on social media text mining for the assessment of well-being by Sametoğlu et al. [32] confirmed the usefulness and validity of this approach for assessing well-being. It reported that eudaimonic well-being is researched less than hedonic well-being and most studies applied closed-vocabulary methods to analyze language features, although data-driven and open-vocabulary methods can provide valuable predictions.
With regard to the analysis of emotional well-being, Settanni and Marengo [33] supported the possibility of studying individual emotional well-being through an automated analysis of emotion-related textual indicators (including emoticons) in Facebook profiles, employing the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. Their study revealed significant correlations between LIWC emotion-related categories and users’ emotional well-being.
Among the most comprehensive studies, Iacus et al. [34,35] proposed a human-supervised machine learning method, the Integrated Sentiment Analysis (iSA) algorithm, based on Twitter data to obtain a composite index of subjective well-being, inspired by the dimensions proposed by the New Economic Foundation.
Overall, previous research highlights the promising opportunities offered by UGC as a source of data to complement traditional approaches to studying the emotional aspects of well-being.

2.2. Transformative Tourism Experiences on Pathways and Well-Being

Well-being represents a relevant topic in contemporary tourism research [1,2,5], with an increasing number of studies addressing tourist well-being [7] and growing scholarly attention to the design of transformative tourism experiences that can promote human flourishing, a healthy life, and all-ages well-being, in line with SDG number 3, Good Health and Well-being [3,36].
Tourist well-being has been defined as “the tourists’ affective pleasure and inner feeling of self-growth in the process of satisfying various sensory needs and achieving travel goals” and has been operationalized into tourist hedonia, referring to positive emotions and greater pleasure derived from tourism experiences, and tourist eudaimonia, connected to the achievement of individual potential and self-realization [37,38].
Studies have investigated the well-being outcomes of tourism practices in various travel contexts, including medical and health tourism, adventure tourism and nature-based tourism [6,39].
Within the contemporary debate on tourism and well-being, increasing attention has been devoted to the role of cultural and nature-based tourism experiences on pathways for human transformation and well-being. Recent studies have highlighted the role of tourism on walking, hiking and cycling routes in relation to its capability to meet the need for authentic, intensive inner experiences [9,10], combining physical effort with multi-sensory and spiritual (religious and non-religious) experiences [9]. Travelling along routes can be regarded as a process of personal transformation [11,40,41] with positive effects in terms of human transformation and well-being. Indeed, experiences along pathways provide travellers with a variety of experiential opportunities that are conducive to self-transformation, including immersion in nature, outdoor physical activities, religious/spiritual travel, cultural travel and slow tourism [15].
A growing body of research has addressed the well-being benefits for individuals travelling along pathways from different cultural, tourism and health-related perspectives [11,18], including religious/secular pilgrimages as a spiritual, religious, or self-developmental experience, hiking as a slow, nature-based tourism activity, and long-distance walking as ‘green exercise’ for psychological and physical health [11].
Research on pilgrimages has identified different, concurrent transformative/therapeutic factors that could be behind the positive effects on psychological, social, and spiritual well-being, including [11,19,42,43,44]: a sense of purpose and accomplishment from completing the challenge of the journey; a sense of cohesion or bonding from community with fellow travellers; escape from stressful daily routines and restoration; improved mood and health deriving from physical exercise (walking) and immersion in nature; a sense of identity and meaning in life found through time for reflection on larger existential questions; a sense of spirituality from the accomplishment of religious values and a deeper connection between the mind, body and soul.
For instance, studies on transformative pilgrimage experiences on the Camino of Santiago provided evidence of a range of well-being effects in terms of an enhanced sense of meaning and self-actualization [20,41,45,46], improved self-confidence [40], a deeper sense of spirituality [20,41,43,46,47,48], positive affect and mood states [19,40,41,42,46,47,48,49], stronger social relationships [19,20,41,43,46,47,48], and an increase in life satisfaction alongside a reduction in anxiety, depression, and perceived stress [42].
Well-being effects have also been reported by studies on other pilgrims’ experiences, including the Via Francigena [18], Umra and Haj [50], St. Olav Way [51], Daja Matsu [52], the Seoul Catholic Pilgrimage Route [14], the Arbaeen pilgrimage [53] and young pilgrims’ experiences [54].
Within research on the Camino pilgrims’ experiences, some studies have used UGC (such as online reviews, social media, online travel blogs and diaries). Brumec et al. [46] inductively identified a typology of exceptional experiences and transformative aftereffects of pilgrims on the Camino of Santiago using travelogues. Online journals posted by Chinese travellers were used by Zhang et al. [49] as a source to investigate their experiences on the Camino of Santiago. Zhang et al. [48] conducted a deductive thematic analysis of online travel blogs and personal stories from social media to identify the dimensions of Chinese Camino travellers’ spiritual experiences. Van Laer and Izberk-Bilgin [26] conducted a discourse analysis of pilgrimage reviews on TripAdvisor to explore the spiritual and the material aspects of pilgrimage experiences, revealing that the spiritual, transformative aspect is narrative and highly emotional, while the material aspect is accounted for a predominantly analytical form. Johnmeyer et al. [43] identified elements of the Camino de Santiago that facilitate pilgrims’ transformative experiences through a mixed-method approach combining a content analysis of pilgrims’ social media posts and a survey.
Parallel research on hiking tourism has highlighted its SWB benefits through the enjoyment of the natural environment, escape from routine and challenging, new experiences [17,55]. A scoping review by Mau et al. [11] addressed the benefits of long-distance walking on mental health, considering studies on pilgrimage, walking, trekking and hiking in a range of settings. Their study highlighted the variety of mental health notions and methods used in the literature and found support for a consistent association with lower emotional distress through a synergistic effect of positive outcomes from walking and from exposure to nature, which appears to align with the hedonic notion of well-being.
From different but related perspectives [11], previous research thus provides a growing basis of evidence on the potential of experiences on pathways to generate transformative effects and contribute to travellers’ subjective well-being, including emotional well-being. It further denotes that recent studies devote increasing attention to the use of UGC as a valuable source of data for exploring travellers’ experiences on pathways and their transformative nature. This research is emerging and characterized by different approaches to the content analysis of UGC, including within mixed methods, which include manual analysis and the use of corpus analysis tools. The potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for taking full advantage of this big data emerges as a relevant area for further research and this paper aims to contribute to this direction through the analysis of UGC relating to TripAdvisor reviews on Italian pathways.

3. Research Methodology

3.1. Study Context: Italian Pathways

In recent years, Italian pathways (Cammini d’Italia) have assumed an increasingly prominent role in national tourism policies for promoting sustainable tourism. The Italian Ministry of Tourism (MiTur) recently launched the development of the Catalogue of Italian Religious Routes (https://www.ministeroturismo.gov.it/catalogo-dei-cammini-religiosi-italiani/, accessed on 10 March 2026), which currently includes nearly 50 officially recognized paths. According to the 2026 report Italia, Paese di Cammini (Italy, Land of Pathways), published by Terre di Mezzo Editore [56], participation in these paths is steadily increasing. In 2025, a total of 158,024 pilgrim credentials were issued, marking a 29.18% increase compared to 2024. The number of Testimonium certificates, documents awarded to those who complete a route, also rose by more than 9%, reaching 80,225. The report also highlights the wide range of motivations that lead people to undertake a walking journey: alongside those driven by religious or spiritual reasons, many choose to set out in order to reconnect with nature, seek mental and emotional well-being, improve their physical fitness, explore unfamiliar places, meet new people, and experience something new. The consistent rise in participation reflects a broader cultural shift toward slower and more meaningful ways of exploring both places and oneself.

3.2. Data Collection and Coding

To explore the emotional well-being associated with travellers’ experiences, this study analyses UGC published on TripAdvisor, one of the world’s most widely used travel platforms [57]. The analytical use of UGC builds on the growing literature recognizing online reviews as valuable sources for understanding tourism experiences and perceived well-being [25,58]. Ten Italian pathways were identified through TripAdvisor, differing in terms of length, number of walkers, and geographic characteristics (Table 1). The selection was guided by these heterogeneity criteria and by the availability of user-generated content (UGC) on the platform. As several officially recognized routes are not represented or only marginally discussed online, the sample reflects pathways for which user-generated narratives are available for analysis.
The review data were collected through a web scraping procedure using R (version 4.3.2) and dedicated packages, including Rselenium. In total, 742 reviews were extracted, written in multiple languages (predominantly Italian) and published between 2010 and 2022. These data were collected and analyzed as part of a wider study of transformative tourism experiences on pathways [15].
Given the narrative nature of the content and the research aim, the analysis focused on emotional well-being, with particular attention to both its positive and negative dimensions. In line with the definitions proposed by the OECD [29] and the NEF [30], emotional well-being is conceptualized as the presence of positive emotions—such as happiness, joy and contentment—and, conversely, the absence or mitigation of negative emotions, including anxiety, sadness, fear and anger. Within this conceptualisation, positive emotional well-being refers to pleasant feelings experienced along the Cammini d’Italia, while negative emotional well-being reflects unpleasant emotional states that may diminish the overall quality of the travel experience.
When analyzing travellers’ reviews on TripAdvisor and their association with well-being, the range of motives for eWOM communications needs to be considered. According to the typology developed by Hennig-Thurau et al. [61], these can be referred to as focus-related, consumption, approval, moderator-related and homeostase utilities. In line with this typology, it can be assumed that emotional well-being expressed in the reviews as conceived in this study can be interpreted through the lens of balance theory in relation to homeostase utility. In this perspective, the imbalance deriving from either a strong positive or negative consumption experience can be restored by expressing positive emotions that are experienced as part of a successful consumption experience and venting negative feelings associated with a dissatisfying consumption experience [61]. However, it should also be acknowledged that other concurrent motivations cannot be excluded a priori, including for instance a self-enhancement motivation, i.e., the desire for positive recognition from others related to approval utility, and/o or pro-social behaviour manifested in concern for other customers associated with focus-related utility [61].
To semantically classify the textual content, the study employed a large language model (LLM) provided by OpenAI. LLMs have recently been adopted in social science research for text classification tasks due to their ability to capture semantic nuances and contextual meaning in unstructured data [62,63]. In this study, the GPT-4o-mini model was accessed via an API and used to classify each review into predefined categories of positive emotional well-being, negative emotional well-being, or non-emotional content.
The prompt was designed to ensure conceptual alignment with the study’s operationalization of emotional well-being and to structure the classification task in a consistent and transparent way. Specifically, the model was instructed to assign each TripAdvisor review to one of the predefined categories of emotional well-being, based on its semantic content. Each category was defined through explicit descriptions grounded in the OECD and NEF frameworks on emotional well-being, specifying the range of affective states associated with positive and negative emotional conditions. To support semantic disambiguation, the prompt incorporated a set of reviews manually coded by the authors, used as reference cases within the prompt to anchor the model’s interpretation in empirically observed linguistic patterns. This prompt design combines category definitions and empirical examples, enabling the model to perform a constrained semantic classification task while reducing ambiguity in the interpretation of heterogeneous narrative data. Given the multilingual nature of the dataset, the model was applied directly to reviews in different languages, relying on its multilingual capabilities for semantic interpretation. The model was instructed to return only the category label, in order to ensure consistency across outputs. Reviews were processed iteratively in Python (version 3.11), and when no clear emotional content was identified, the model returned the label “non-emotional”. To assess the reliability of the classification, a sample of the reviews was independently coded by the authors and compared with the model outputs, indicating a high level of agreement between human and model-based classifications.

3.3. Data Analysis

To explore the content of reviews related to experiences along the Cammini d’Italia, four main text analysis techniques were applied. First, following established approaches in the literature [64,65], a Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) analysis was conducted to identify the most distinctive terms associated with each category. Unlike simple frequency-based methods, which highlight the most commonly used words overall, the TF-IDF method captures the relative specificity of a word within a particular category compared to its distribution across all categories. TF-IDF weighting was used to identify terms that were distinctive within each emotional category. As a result, words that are frequent in one category but rare in others receive higher scores. This approach enables the identification of category-specific vocabulary, offering more nuanced insights into the emotional and linguistic patterns expressed in the reviews.
Second, a lexical co-occurrence analysis was carried out. It focused on exploring semantic networks related to three theoretical macro-dimensions that are associated with the subjective perception of well-being in studies on pilgrimage and trekking experiences [17,20,41,44,55]: (i) Challenge (e.g., effort, fatigue, goal), understood as the dimension of physical effort and personal achievement; (ii) Community (e.g., companions, sharing, friends, groups), referring to social interaction, encounter, and shared experience; (iii) Escape (e.g., pause, relax, freedom), relating to symbolic or regenerative detachment from everyday routines. For each dimension, representative keywords were identified and their co-occurrence patterns were examined across the corpus to investigate how they connected semantically with other terms used by reviewers. The analysis was implemented using the widyr package in R, enabling the mapping of semantic associations within documents and the identification of latent structures characterizing the emotional and thematic configuration of the narratives.
Thirdly, this study adopts an ad hoc emotional dictionary to investigate more deeply the emotional component of experiences along the pathways. Specifically, we integrated a previously developed and validated dictionary [66], which incorporated emotional keywords and terms from the NRC Emotion Lexicon [67]. The NRC Lexicon, also known as EmoLex, includes a comprehensive list of English words associated with eight basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) and two sentiments (positive and negative), and has been previously applied to analyze emotional content in tourism-related texts (e.g., [68]). In the present study, the initial dictionary was further expanded with the support of ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini). This use of ChatGPT was limited to synonym generation, in order to ensure consistency with the original emotional categories. The final version of the emotional dictionary includes over 200 words, around 40% of which were newly added, each linked to specific emotions or affective connotations.
Finally, the reviews were examined using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, with the aim of exploring in greater depth the grammatical use of words associated with different emotional categories. Specifically, the objective was to understand whether certain emotions were expressed through recurring linguistic structures, verb tenses, or morphosyntactic categories, thereby enriching the qualitative interpretation of the texts with a systematic linguistic dimension. The core linguistic annotation was conducted using the udpipe package [69], which enables tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and morphological parsing through pre-trained language models. The adopted model is part of the Universal Dependencies (UD) project and is specifically trained on Italian corpora, making it suitable for syntactic and grammatical analysis of Italian texts [70]. The corpus encompasses 14,167 sentences; 278,429 tokens; 298,344 words. It was processed word by word and sentence by sentence, yielding an annotated dataset with lemmas (dictionary root forms), POS tags (e.g., noun, verb, adjective), and detailed grammatical features (such as mood and tense).

4. Findings

The automated review analysis, performed using the classification model, allowed for the categorization of the texts into three main categories: positive emotional well-being, negative emotional well-being, and an absence of explicit emotional references (labelled as “non-emotional”). As shown in Table 2, more than half of the reviews (60.5%) express a positive emotional response to the experience, while approximately one-third (34.0%) contain no explicit emotional content. Only a small portion of the reviews (5.5%) were classified as expressing negative emotions of disappointment and discomfort.
These findings align with previous research highlighting the highly emotional nature of these experiences and of their narration in online reviews [26]. Further, they appear to be in line with previous research pointing to the role of tourism experiences on pathways for enhancing SWB and improving their mood states from before to after the journey [19].
At the same time, the interpretation of these results should take into account the potential influence of self-selection dynamics in online reviews, whereby individuals experiencing stronger emotional reactions may be more inclined to contribute. Nevertheless, the presence of non-emotional reviews (34%) in the dataset suggests that user-generated content also includes a relevant share of neutral and descriptive accounts, indicating that emotional expression, while prominent, does not exhaust the ways in which these experiences are narrated.
To further investigate the nature of the content associated with each category, a textual analysis based on the TF-IDF metric, combined with bigram extraction, was carried out. This approach minimized the influence of commonly used terms such as “trail” and “path” and instead highlighted the most distinctive lexical features of each category (Figure 1).
Reviews classified under negative emotional well-being are characterized by expressions of disappointment and experiential dissatisfaction. These texts frequently mention issues related to poor maintenance, inadequate signage, or safety concerns along the route. Recurring expressions include “poorly marked,” “poorly maintained,” “no sidewalk” and “neglected,” alongside terms such as “disappointment,” “insufficient,” “nonexistent,” “inaccurate,” and “expensive.” In contrast, positive emotional well-being reviews reflect a high degree of emotional engagement and an overall positive appraisal of the experience. Keywords such as “beautiful,” “moving,” “admire,” “reflect,” and “very evocative” suggest a strong sense of appreciation. These reviews also show a higher frequency of references to the natural environment, with words like “waterfall,” “forest,” “nature,” and “lake” helping to frame the experience as immersive and restorative. Reviews falling into the non-emotional category are instead characterized by a neutral and descriptive tone. The focus is primarily on practical aspects of the route, including distances covered, stages, travel times, points of interest and historical facts. This is reflected in the frequent use of terms such as “kilometer,” “section,” and “duration.” The communicative function of these reviews appears to be oriented toward the sharing of objective information rather than the expression of emotional states.
These findings align with previous evidence on the nature of pilgrimage reviews on TripAdvisor, including pilgrims’ negative experiences often associated with material aspects of the experience [26]. Our textual analysis shows that reviews categorized as negative emotional well-being are characterized by experiential dissatisfaction with material and organizational aspects of the journey, while reviews under the positive emotional wellbeing category are associated with the spiritual experiential elements.
The co-occurrence analysis further clarifies how the three theoretical dimensions structure emotional well-being. Specifically, the results show that in reviews associated with positive emotional well-being, the challenge dimension (Figure 2) is structured around a rich semantic network, dominated by terms such as effort, goal, and arrival. In this context, physical effort is valued as an integral part of the experience, interpreted as both transformative and fulfilling. The notions of arrival and reaching a goal carry symbolic meaning, linked to personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, in line with previous research emphasizing the positive emotions associated with the feeling of being challenged during the trekking journey and the sense of strength, competence and endurance [17,43]. In contrast, negatively connoted reviews display a weaker and more fragmented semantic structure. The associated terms refer primarily to practical difficulties or unmet expectations (e.g., nothing, disappointment, luggage, hotel). In non-emotional reviews, these same keywords tend to have a mostly descriptive and informational function, often related to geographical and technical aspects of the route (e.g., Tuscany, Francigena, stage, path), suggesting limited personal engagement.
As expected, the community dimension (Figure 3) also emerges strongly in positive reviews, where terms such as companions, meeting, getting to know, friends, and group frequently co-occur with words evoking emotional and welcoming experiences (e.g., emotions, beautiful, guided, experience, nature). These semantic networks indicate that social interaction is perceived as an essential component of well-being, often described as a moment of personal enrichment, discovery, and connection. In negative and non-emotional reviews, by contrast, the social dimension appears less developed and more marginal. This aligns with previous findings highlighting the relevance of these experiences in terms of social well-being outcomes through strengthened relationships with others (e.g., [18,19,20,43,48,51]).
Finally, the escape dimension (Figure 4) is also prominently featured in positive reviews, which exhibit a cohesive semantic network centred around terms such as pause, relaxation, and freedom. These terms are frequently associated with natural and spiritual elements (such as nature, waterfalls, silence, spirituality, and religious sites) suggesting that the walking experience is perceived as a form of physical and mental regeneration, a break from the rhythms of everyday life. The word relax emerges as a central node in this network, connected both to sensory and bodily experiences (pleasant, relaxing, beautiful) and to symbolic and spiritual meanings (walk, experience, peace). Similarly, the term pause is linked to emblematic places (e.g., castle, lake), functioning as a moment of contemplation and meaning-making along the journey. In negative and neutral reviews, terms associated with the escape dimension are largely marginal or entirely absent. This supports the relevance of this dimension in terms of SBW, highlighted in previous studies as a central motivation for pilgrimages and slow tourism experiences [11,17,45,49].
The analysis of emotional language revealed statistically significant differences across the three emotional well-being categories (p < 0.001). Reviews classified as expressing positive emotional well-being were not only the most prevalent but also exhibited a significantly higher density and intensity of emotionally connoted language compared to negative and non-emotional reviews.
The distribution of individual emotional terms reinforces this pattern (Table 3). The word “beautiful” dominates within the positive category, appearing in 92% of those reviews, compared to only 19% in the negative category. Conversely, the term “unique” emerges more frequently in negative reviews, though typically in a critical context (e.g., “the only downside,” “the one flaw”). Reviews labelled as non-emotional are characterized by a significant underrepresentation, or complete absence, of emotionally connoted language, further supporting their classification.
To further investigate the linguistic structure of the reviews, a syntactic analysis based on UPOS tagging was performed. The analysis revealed significant differences in the distribution of grammatical categories across the three emotional well-being groups (p < 0.001, Kruskal–Wallis test). Specific classes, such as subordinating conjunctions (SCONJ), auxiliary verbs (AUX), adverbs (ADV), pronouns (PRON), main verbs (VERB), punctuation marks (PUNCT), and adjectives (ADJ), proved especially relevant in distinguishing between positively and negatively connoted reviews.
Reviews categorized as expressing negative emotional well-being exhibited a higher frequency of subordinating conjunctions, suggesting more complex syntactic constructions. This may indicate a more reflective and elaborative narrative style, often used to justify or articulate dissatisfaction. For example, negative reviews tend to describe problems or shortcomings using multi-clause sentences, as illustrated by the following example: “It could have been wonderful, because the views are stunning, but the trail is, in my opinion, poorly maintained and at times poorly marked, which makes it easy to get lost, as has happened to us before.” In contrast, positive reviews are more concise and direct, often relying on short, emotionally charged statements such as “Wonderful experience” or “A must-do.”
Negative reviews display greater syntactic and verbal complexity, reflected in higher frequencies of subordinating conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and adverbial modifiers. Punctuation and adjectives were also more prevalent in negative reviews, indicating a higher degree of expressiveness, often used to underscore criticism or emphasize negative evaluations. Neutral reviews, by contrast, were characterized by a more impersonal and utilitarian style. The language was typically focused on factual descriptions of the trail, such as distances, segments, duration, points of interest, and historical notes, with minimal emotional engagement.
Overall, the syntactic analysis supports the presence of three distinct linguistic styles: direct and affective in positive reviews, complex and argumentative in negative reviews, and a factual and descriptive in non-emotional reviews. These patterns in grammatical usage align with differences in communicative intent and emotional intensity across the three categories. This result contrasts with previous evidence by Van Laer and Izberk-Bilgin [26], which highlighted that in pilgrims’ TripAdvisor reviews spiritual aspects were communicated in an exclusively narrative manner, while more material aspects emerged predominantly analytically in form.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

This study contributes to the growing debate within tourism well-being research by examining how emotional well-being associated with nature-based pathway experiences is narrated by travellers. Emotional well-being emerges through interaction with the environment, physical effort and shared experiences, reinforcing the idea that sustainable tourism practices can foster meaningful connections between people and places with potential for enhanced subjective well-being.
This contribution aligns with the increasing attention devoted to the role of historical and cultural pathways for promoting healthier lifestyles, as in the HIKE -HIKing for a healthier lifestyle project “https://hike-project.eu/project/hike_project_2024-2025/ (accessed on 30 March 2026)”, and the study of pilgrimage’s effects on mental health (see as a notable example the Ultreya project related to the Camino de Santiago “http://estudiocamino.org (accessed on 30 March 2026)”.
The present study extends the emerging literature employing user-generated textual data to assess well-being in tourism contexts, a line of inquiry that, despite its potential, is still relatively limited [25]. In this direction, the data-driven approach adopted in this study is oriented to provide a contribution to systematically exploring how emotional well-being associated with tourism experiences on pathways is communicated through travellers’ reviews published on TripAdvisor. This is significant in the light of contemporary research on the potential of big data as an emerging source for well-being measurement [24] as well as the increasing interest in slow experiences on pathways as a form of sustainable tourism with positive, transformative benefits for tourists and communities [8,9,10,18].
The study provides a systematic approach for analyzing user-generated textual data leveraging the potential of LLMs in the context of transformative tourism experiences on pathways. Although previous research highlighted the highly emotional nature of online reviews associated with pilgrimage experiences [26] as well as their benefits in terms of positive emotions [40,41,46,48,49], affect [42] and mood changes [19], it has not specifically explored how emotional well-being emerges in travellers’ self-accounts of these experiences. Interestingly, this study shows that most reviews (66%) contain some account of the positive or negative well-being derived from these experiences.
Further, the findings provide evidence of how positive emotional well-being is communicated in TripAdvisor reviews relating to the 10 analyzed pathways. The syntactic analysis shows the presence of three distinct linguistic styles in the reviews for positive, negative and non-emotional categories. It further advances previous findings on some of the main dimensions of experiences on pathways associated with well-being, notably challenge, community and escape, showing how these are communicated by travellers in terms of positive and negative emotional well-being.

5.1. Theoretical and Practical Implications

The main theoretical contribution of the study is related to the effort made to introduce an innovative approach for automatically analyzing how SWB is communicated through UGC building on a well-established conceptualization of emotional well-being that is widely adopted in official international statistics and studies on SWB. Further, it advances the still-limited research leveraging the potential of online reviews for analyzing tourism experiences on pathways and their association to transformative, well-being outcomes. In this regard, the proposed approach can facilitate systematic, large-scale and comparable analyses across pathways to understand how travellers’ emotional well-being is communicated in online reviews. It can usefully complement other sources that are currently used to analyse tourism on pathways (i.e., structured data from questionnaires), by providing a more spontaneous experiential perspective of their behaviour.
The approach presented in this study can provide insights for the purposeful design, management and measurement of experiences on pathways for well-being. From a practical perspective, the findings suggest that investment in maintenance, signage, safety, and environmental quality is closely associated with visitors’ well-being outcomes. Negative emotional narratives are primarily linked to infrastructural and organizational deficiencies, indicating that environmental neglect undermines both experiential quality and well-being benefits. Conversely, the strong association between positive well-being and natural immersion underscores the importance of preserving landscape integrity, biodiversity, and accessibility. Beyond these operational implications, the findings also highlight the relevance of adopting a more integrated perspective on pathway experiences. The observed differences in emotional and linguistic patterns across reviews suggest that visitors’ responses are not only linked to individual aspects of the journey but also emerge from the overall configuration of the experience. This highlights the importance of considering how these experiences are designed and managed as a whole, in order to enhance well-being, rather than focusing exclusively on isolated elements of improvement.
For destination managers and policymakers, integrating well-being indicators derived from user-generated data may support evidence-based decisions that align conservation goals with sustainable tourism development. It aligns with the need to introduce a perspective oriented to promoting natural and cultural heritage for the improvement of peoples’ lives that necessarily prioritize the understanding of what is meaningful to them [71]. Through the automatic and systematic analysis of traveller’s spontaneous self-reports of their experiences in terms of associated SWB, it can provide insights into the relevant factors associated with travellers’ well-being and inform the promotion of these experiences for human transformation in line with sustainable development goals [3,39]. Overall, this study shows how TripAdvisor reviews can be used as an extensive and timely source of data that can complement existing approaches for the analysis of SWB in the sustainable tourism context. This is relevant considering the strategic need for tourism destinations, including European Cultural Routes and pathways such as those considered in this study, to incorporate well-being indicators into destination governance frameworks, aligning tourism development with broader sustainability and human flourishing objectives.

5.2. Research Limitations and Future Studies

The study acknowledges several limitations, which also suggest directions for future research. These relate to the specific focus on tourism experiences on pathways, the number of the investigated paths, and the adoption of text mining as the main analytical approach. In particular, the analysis is based on a limited set of Italian pathways, which may not fully capture the diversity of experiences associated with different types of routes and contexts. Expanding the analysis to a larger number of pathways, including both additional Italian and international routes, would allow for a more comprehensive representation of pathway experiences and enhance the generalizability of the findings. Future research could further strengthen these results by exploring additional tourism contexts and integrating evidence from multiple data sources. In addition, we categorize reviews as only positive or negative well-being categories, but it has been noted that both positive and negative aspects can be present in the same review [26]. Finally, the multiplicity of users’ motivations in eWOM communications needs to be considered in line with Hennig-Thurau et al. [61]. In this regard, the interpretation of findings can be potentially influenced by the existence of non-homogeneous motivations of users for engaging in online reviews, which can also include social benefits, concern for others, and extraversion/self-enhancement, in addition to the desire for expressing positive and negative feelings experienced as part of their travel experience on pathways.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, A.M. and V.M.; methodology, A.M. and V.M.; validation, A.M. and V.M.; formal analysis, A.M. and V.M.; data curation A.M. and V.M.; writing—original draft preparation, A.M. and V.M.; writing—review and editing, A.M. and V.M. A.M. and V.M. have contributed equally to this work and share first authorship. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors on request.

Acknowledgments

In this study, the GPT-4o-mini model was accessed via API and used to classify each review into predefined well-being categories.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Figure 1. Words by category (TF-IDF weight).
Figure 1. Words by category (TF-IDF weight).
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Figure 2. Lexical co-occurrence network for positive (blue) and negative (red) emotional well-being in the Challenge dimension. Note: The co-occurrence graph represents words as nodes and links them with edges when they co-occur within a predefined textual corpus. Edge thickness reflects co-occurrence frequency.
Figure 2. Lexical co-occurrence network for positive (blue) and negative (red) emotional well-being in the Challenge dimension. Note: The co-occurrence graph represents words as nodes and links them with edges when they co-occur within a predefined textual corpus. Edge thickness reflects co-occurrence frequency.
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Figure 3. Lexical co-occurrence network for positive (blue) and negative (red) emotional well-being in the Community dimension. Note: The co-occurrence graph represents words as nodes and links them with edges when they co-occur within a predefined textual corpus. Edge thickness reflects co-occurrence frequency.
Figure 3. Lexical co-occurrence network for positive (blue) and negative (red) emotional well-being in the Community dimension. Note: The co-occurrence graph represents words as nodes and links them with edges when they co-occur within a predefined textual corpus. Edge thickness reflects co-occurrence frequency.
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Figure 4. Lexical co-occurrence network for positive emotional well-being in the Escape dimension.
Figure 4. Lexical co-occurrence network for positive emotional well-being in the Escape dimension.
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Table 1. The 10 Cammini d’Italia analyzed, by kilometres and regions.
Table 1. The 10 Cammini d’Italia analyzed, by kilometres and regions.
Cammini d’ItaliaKmN. of Regions
Via Francigena197010
Via Romea Germanica10506
Via degli Dei1212
Sentiero della Pace5203
Cammino di Francesco5003
Cammino Minerario di Santa Barbara5001
Cammino di San Giacomo1301
Cammino dei Briganti1082
Via Spluga651
Cammino di Oropa2212
Data from Catalogo dei Cammini Religiosi Italiani [59]; Terre di Mezzo Editore [60].
Table 2. Classification of reviews based on emotional well-being.
Table 2. Classification of reviews based on emotional well-being.
Categoryn.%Examples of Reviews
Positive emotional well-being44960.5“…you can truly experience something unforgettable. For me, it was a wonderful day spent in contact with nature, streams, and waterfalls. Stunning waterfalls that give you the feeling of touching Paradise…”
“…along the trails, the scents of unspoiled nature gradually give way to small paths that once served the higher homes for stocking up before winter. It is an absolute must-visit for nature lovers. I always return gladly to clear my mind of stress and fatigue…”
“…it is possible to fully immerse yourself in nature and enjoy a variety of breathtaking views! It is a beautiful therapy for both mind and body—I highly recommend it if you feel the need to escape the greyness of the city while staying within our beautiful Italy!”
Non-emotional25234.0“…From a hiking perspective, the trail does not present major technical difficulties. However, its hilly profile requires a moderate level of fitness and endurance, due to frequent ascents and descents, as well as the relative scarcity of well-equipped towns and supply points along the way. It is advisable to stock up on water and food for lunch at the beginning of each stage, even though water sources are generally available along the route…”
“The famous Via Francigena, also known as the “Way of the Franks,” was the pilgrimage route taken by traveller’s from England and France on their way to Rome (or, conversely, by Romans heading north). The section of the road closest to Rome passed through territories once inhabited by the Etruscans—an area known in the Middle Ages as Tuscia. The “Franks’ path through Tuscia” ran directly through the city of Viterbo, from which Rome lies just over one hundred kilometres away.”
Negative emotional well-being415.5“Poorly marked, poorly maintained, with only rare views of the lake. Some stretches run along paved roads without sidewalks—a real risk of getting hit by a car… A pointless effort!”
“A huge disappointment. Scenically, apart from a few short sections, it is very underwhelming. There is absolutely no organization, neither in terms of signage—which is terrible—nor in terms of amenities: bars, restaurants, and shops are virtually non-existent, and often the staff at the few places we did find were unfriendly… They do not have a welcoming attitude. The various farm stays were also rather unattractive and incredibly expensive…”
“Needs improvement. It could definitely be an interesting trail if it were better maintained. Apart from the signage, which is not always clear, we did not feel entirely safe—part of the path goes near what look like abandoned houses, which is quite unsettling. Not recommended if you are alone. Bring plenty of water if you are hiking in the heat.”
Note: The examples of reviews have been translated into English, as original reviews were in Italian.
Table 3. Use of emotional terms across well-being categories.
Table 3. Use of emotional terms across well-being categories.
Category% of Emotional Words per ReviewEmotional Words per
Review		Examples of Emotional Words
BeautifulUniquePleasureInterestingFear
Negative emotional well-being0.00671.020.190.210.080.050.02
Positive emotional well-being0.01431.090.920.080.090.040
Non-emotional0.00910.790.400.110.070.070
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MDPI and ACS Style

Marasco, A.; Marchi, V. Emotional Well-Being in Tourism Experiences on Pathways: Evidence from User-Generated Content. Sustainability 2026, 18, 5072. https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105072

AMA Style

Marasco A, Marchi V. Emotional Well-Being in Tourism Experiences on Pathways: Evidence from User-Generated Content. Sustainability. 2026; 18(10):5072. https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105072

Chicago/Turabian Style

Marasco, Alessandra, and Valentina Marchi. 2026. "Emotional Well-Being in Tourism Experiences on Pathways: Evidence from User-Generated Content" Sustainability 18, no. 10: 5072. https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105072

APA Style

Marasco, A., & Marchi, V. (2026). Emotional Well-Being in Tourism Experiences on Pathways: Evidence from User-Generated Content. Sustainability, 18(10), 5072. https://doi.org/10.3390/su18105072

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