Tourist source markets are often described through origin shares or flow volumes, but these measures cannot explain how destination cities build diversified, spatially extended, temporally stable, and network-embedded linkages with source markets. This study develops a system-oriented Market Accessibility and Interaction Index (MAI) for measuring city-level tourist source-market linkage capacity from online review origin data. Using Ctrip reviews collected during a unified data-collection window in October 2025 from 112 A-level attractions selected from the official Liaoning provincial catalog, we compiled a review-level dataset of 76,855 records and retained 29,327 reviews with valid origin, destination-city, timestamp, and distance information for the main analysis. The method proceeded in four steps: sample construction and origin standardization; city-to-origin distance measurement; seven-dimensional indicator construction; and normalization, aggregation, robustness testing, and benchmark comparison. The MAI integrates market scale, source diversity, interprovincial attraction, external effective radius, seasonal stability, input strength, and PageRank centrality. Results reveal pronounced inter-city differentiation. Dalian is the strongest source-market linkage hub, followed by Huludao, Dandong, and Jinzhou, while lower-ranked cities display narrower or less embedded source-market structures. Comparative benchmarking shows that MAI captures multidimensional linkage capacity more comprehensively than single indicators such as review volume, external share, distance reach, or PageRank alone. The study contributes a system-oriented diagnostic measure of city-level source-market linkage capacity and extends online review data from evaluative analysis to structural market measurement.
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Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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