eWOM of Spain’s Tourism Destination in the Rural Context from a Sustainable and Technological Perspective

In an increasingly connected world, the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) represents a relevant aspect in the management of tourist destinations. This provides interesting insights, as the reviews can express the level of satisfaction of tourists, highlighting the factors that contributed to a positive or negative experience. The number of initiatives for sustainable development and the level of awareness of people to care for the planet have also increased in recent years. So, some authors have focused on analyzing eWOM from sustainability. The aim of this study is to analyze the sustainable and technological perceptions of Spanish tourist attractions located in rural areas through eWOM. The source of information is the TripAdvisor travel platform and two data science techniques are employed. The first one is BERTopic, a topic modeling machine learning with which the main topics are detected. The second is text mining to extract both sustainable (environmental, social, economic, cultural) and technological perceptions. Sentiment and emotion analysis is also applied to measure the ratings and degree of satisfaction. The results indicate that tourists perceive and value the cultural dimension most, followed by the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. This research provides useful information to managers of tourist attractions and stakeholders in the tourism sector in the rural context.