Assessing Online Sustainability Communication of Italian Cultural Destinations – A Web Content Mining Approach

Abstract

Online sustainability communication attracts a considerable attention in tourism research. This study focuses on sustainability communication in official destination websites for informing and motivating visitors to adopt sustainable practices and behaviors. To advance previous research in this area, it adopts a web content mining approach to assess the characteristics of online contents of a sample of 20 Italian cultural destinations. The main dimensions and typologies of sustainability-oriented practices in tourism are used as basis to develop a text classifier for the automated content analysis. A total of 2.975 web pages from official city websites and official tourism promotion websites of the destinations is analyzed through this approach to investigate the online contents relating to the environmental, economic, socio-cultural and general dimensions sustainability as well as their emotional appeal. The analysis reveals that about 15.8% of total online texts contains information to promote sustainability-oriented behaviors at the destination. It indicates that the communication is more specifically focused on environmental/economic/socio-cultural practices than generically referring to sustainable/responsible tourism. However, in line with previous research, it highlights that destinations do not sufficiently balance these pillars in their online communication. Further, the websites’ texts scarcely leverage the persuasive potential of affective appealing messages. The implications of this automated approach for improving the design of online sustainability-related contents are also discussed.

Integrated use of KOS and deep learning for data set annotation in tourism domain

“…Tons of information related to touristic and cultural heritage sites are nowadays available on the Internet. In particular, reviews of tourism amenities and sites posted online by tourists represent an emerging source of data to support tourism research (Johnson et al, 2012) as well as travelers (Ho et al, 2012;Fararni et al, 2021) and, more important, policy makers and administrators, who can leverage them to improve many aspects of the sites, such as the available services and their management (Teixeira et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2021) or sustainability (Marchi et al, 2021;Prandi et al, 2021). In Italy the tourism sector generates more than 13% of the national gross domestic product, and it represents over 6% of the employed (WTO, 2018).…”

A Comparison of Official Tourism Websites in Tuscany Region and Istria County Using Topic Modelling

“…Finally, it is important to point out that, considering the increasing role of DMOs in the development of sustainable tourism in the destination (Wagenseil et al 2022) and the importance of websites in the promotion of sustainable tourism, products and behaviours, academics paid attention to evaluating the sustainability of communication through the analysis of websites' contents published by destinations (d'Angella and De Carlo 2016;Marchi et al 2021;Elizondo Saltos et al 2021;Tanković and Mušanović 2022). Previous studies highlighted that tourism organisations lack an appropriate online approach oriented towards sustainability and that in some cases the tourism organisations do not fully utilise their websites to motivate customers to behave more sustainably (Garbelli et al 2017;Villarino and Font 2015;Ghanem and Elgammal 2017).…”

The Environmental Sustainability of Tourist Ports

“…Nevertheless, sustainability communication is a complex process which especially requires the use of interactive tools (Lodhia, 2014;Vitellaro et al, 2022); however, despite their significant potential for sustainability communication by tourism firms, their use is still limited (Marchi et al, 2021). Web-based communication of tourist ports has been explored in the literature (Benevolo & Spinelli, 2018a;2018b), but without a specific focus on sustainability issues.…”