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

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.