Which Dimension of Sustainability Matter for Visitors? An eWOM Analysis of Iceland Attractions

Sustainable tourism is now a widely used paradigm in both tourism research and tourism industry, aiming at balancing the economic, environmental, and socio-cultural aspects of tourism development (Mihalic, 2020). However, usually the environmental dimension is the most adopted from the supply side and is the most well recognized by visitors (e.g. Confente & Scarpi, 2021). The socio-cultural dimension is rapidly assuming momentum as well, particularly when it comes to considering destinations struggling with overtourism (Helgadóttir et al., 2019; Mihalic, 2020). In this vein, sustainability research in tourism has been increasingly focused on social issues, mainly exploring the perspective of residents (e.g. Scarpi et al., 2022), host communities (Zhang et al., 2017) or small tourism enterprises (Zhang & Zhang, 2018); notably, the tourist perspective has been neglected in extant literature on the social dimension (Aydın & Alvarez, 2020). Hence, despite a few exceptions encompassing the three dimensions of sustainability for tourism, there is a need for more research including the socio-cultural dimension together with the well explored environmental one, as perceived by tourists. Tourist social responsibility awareness is defined as the responsibilities of tourists in protecting and improving the socio-cultural interests of a visited destination (Luo et al., 2020; Agapito et al., 2023). An example of socially responsible tourists includes the following review snippet: The guide was a true expert and Island native. I loved going to the new Viking exhibit and hearing about the traditions of this wonderful community! My whole family enjoyed the tour. Tourists can significantly contribute in such direction by behaving socially and environmentally responsibly, thus being actively involved in the multidimensional sustainability of tourism destinations (Ferrari et al., 2021). In addition, tourists’ perceptions of the social and environmental sustainability of the destination are fundamental to loyalty and future behavior (e.g. re-visit intention, WOM/eWOM) (Kim et al., 2018; Ferrari et al., 2021). Previous studies have related destination social sustainability to tourists’ intention to visit (Su et al., 2020) and tourists’ positive WOM (Saleh et al., 2023); it is worth noting that, in extant literature, this was analyzed mainly through surveys. Other studies that consider real eWOM behavior were mainly focused on the hospitality industry and on environmentally framed eWOM (D’Acunto et al., 2020, 2023; Mariani & Borghi, 2020). This study explores to what extent tourists travelling to a destination (i.e. Iceland) discuss online on the social and environmental aspects when reviewing online their attraction experience. Although it was long considered a remote and not easily accessible tourism destination (Sæþórsdóttir & Hall, 2021), Iceland is now suffering from overtourism (Helgadóttir et al., 2019; Sæþórsdóttir & Hall, 2021), since it has seen an exponential growth of tourism arrivals, ranging from 303,000 arrivals in 2000 and reached 2 million arrivals in 2019 (Icelandic Tourist Board, 2023), with overall negative consequences on tourists’ satisfaction (Sæþórsdóttir & Hall, 2021). Around 350,000 online travel reviews of 1445 Iceland attractions (including museums, nature & parks, nightlife, slights & landmarks, spas & wellness, water & amusement parks, zoos & aquariums, fun & games) were collected from TripAdvisor by means of a specific data crawler developed with Python. Data covers over ten years (2013–2023) including the COVID-19 period. The fields collected include reviewer demographics (e.g. age, gender, country of origin), type of trip (e.g. business, couples, families, friends, solo), the device of posting (mobile, laptop), the reviewer performances on the platform (e.g. n° of contributions, n° of followers, total points, badges, helpful votes received), the review rating (scale 1-5) and both the review textual (e.g. review text, review title, review answer) and visual (e.g. review pictures) content. The social and environmental-related content in reviews were detected with text analytics relying on a specific dictionary developed for the study social and environmental sustainability (Pencle & Malaescu, 2016) already adopted in the tourism domain (Mariani & Borghi, 2023; D’Acunto et al., 2023), and the analysis were carried out by LIWC. The preliminary findings exhibit how, since 2016, travelers have started paying an increasing attention to the social aspects (e.g. employees, human rights, social and community) of sustainability when reviewing online their attraction experience, overcoming the environmental ones starting from 2018. Conversely, the environmental content in reviews seems to follow a decreasing trend over the 2013-2023 period. Attractions labeled under Fun & Games and Sights & Landmarks are respectively associated with the highest (2.282) and lowest (0.846) levels of social-related content in reviews, while (F = 3351.039. p < 0.01) while Sights & Landmarks and Nightlife are respectively associated with the highest (2.543) and lowest (1.151) levels of environmentally related content in reviews (F = 1886.238. p < 0.01) Furthermore, a comparison between domestic and international tourists exhibits how Icelanders report higher levels of social-related content in reviews (1.945) compared to international tourists (1.731; F = 55.072. p < 0.01), thus suggesting how domestic tourists pay greater attention to social aspects of sustainability when reviewing attractions online. In addition, domestic tourists have started paying higher attention to social aspects than environmental ones earlier (2016) than their international counterparts (2018). This research will contribute to the sustainable tourism literature, highlighting that visitors do care about different aspects of sustainability and express their concerns and experiences through online reviews. In particular, a rising interest towards the social dimension can be underscored in the online discussions among tourists. Destinations, especially those suffering from overtourism, should recognize the increasing importance of this dimension of sustainability for visitors and, thus, for the destination's competitiveness. Future research should go deeper into the data by qualitatively exploring the recurring topics discussed in socially framed reviews as well as understanding the valence of tourists’ narratives in socially framed reviews.