Natural parks image: an analysis of tripadvisor reviews

Natural parks and protected areas have been a significant subject of tourism studies. Understanding the image that visitants have of these areas is important to the planning process, and the analysis of online reviews is a method- ology used in different investigations. TripAdvisor is the most used review aggre- gator in these studies. In this context, this research aimed to analyse the image of three cross-border natural parks based on TripAdvisor reviews. For this, 321 reviews of the Montesinho Natural Park (Portugal), Douro International Nature Park (Portugal) and Arribes del Duero Natural Park (Spain) were collected and analysed using the machine learning techniques known as Latent Dirichlet Allo- cation. Two dimensions were determined for the Montesinho (scenery and nature), two for Douro International (activities and nature) and three for Arribes del Duero (water-based activities, nature, activities). The dimensions were measured on a 1–5 scale It can be concluded that the three parks present a positive image, with averages higher than 4, being 4.47 points (±0.703) for the evaluation of Mon- tesinho, 4.48 (±0.671) for Douro International and 4.50 (±0.703) for Arrribes del Duero. The common dimension in the three parks was nature, which also presented the best average in the three realities. This study presented as a limitation the use only of TripAdvisor for data collection, suggesting the use of other platforms in future studies. ; This project is being carried out within the scope of the DuraDOURO - El Duero como recurso perdurable del paisaje y el territorio de la frontera, 0785_DURADOURO_2_E, financed by FEDER, through the POCTEP. The authors are also grateful to the UNIAG, R&D unit funded by the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for the Develop- ment of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. “Project Code Reference: UIDB/04752/2020 e UIDP/04752/2020”. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion