The Maintenance of Monuments as the Main Trigger to Negative Feelings in Tourists

Abstract

Tourists’ perceptions of monuments influence their feelings about the country and the possibility of returning or recommending their visit to other tourists. TripAdvisor is one of the most popular websites for sharing travelling experiences and plays an important role when choosing a travel destination. But what are the factors that can provoke negative feelings in tourists? The maintenance of monuments is essential for their conservation; however, active maintenance can trigger negative feelings in tourists, compromising their connection with the cultural heritage of the country. This study reveals how some maintenance actions can influence tourists’ expectations regarding two relevant architectural monuments in the Iberian Peninsula by applying VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning) to 13,000 TripAdvisor reviews written in the last decade and in three languages. Other variables, such as weather conditions and changes in climate, tourists’ country of origin and their style of travel, are evaluated to eliminate the possible mediating effects of these variables. This study reveals that the maintenance status of monuments seems to be the variable with the greatest impact on tourists’ perceptions and on their evaluations on TripAdvisor, propagating negative feelings towards the monument, from which it takes some time to recover.