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This study explores the tourist touchpoints of nature-based tourism destinations and examines how these touchpoints shape tourist experiences, using tourists’ expressed emotions as evidence of their salience. Analysing TripAdvisor reviews of Dal Lake and Chilika Lake of India, we apply structural topic modelling alongside emotion detection to surface and characterize touchpoints. The analysis reveals a coherent set of domains – social touchpoints (interactions with locals), sustainability touchpoints (conservation enforcement and waste management), environmental touchpoints (scenery and biodiversity), and core service interactions. Results show that negative emotions are most often associated with social touchpoints and sustainability touchpoints, such as unethical behaviour by locals, aggressive selling, or unsustainable practices. Core service touchpoints and environmental touchpoints, including houseboat stays, shikara rides, and biodiversity encounters, are the main sources of strong positive emotions that make the destinations memorable. The study’s contributions are: (a) Destination-specific tourist touchpoint map for nature-based tourism that elevates social and sustainability factors as influential touchpoints, (b) Transparent, review-driven method for diagnosing touchpoints using emotion cues, and (c) Actionable implications for managers focused on nature-based tourism development and management, suggesting that social, governance, and sustainable touchpoints must be emphasized along with core product management.
Vajpai et al. (Tue,) studied this question.