Tourist perceptions of cultural tourism: A sentiment analysis of TripAdvisor reviews

Background: Penglipuran, a Bali Aga village in Bangli, Bali, is an internationally recognized example of community-based cultural tourism whose daily life, customary law, and ceremonies are organized around Balinese Hindu practice. Empirical analyses of how visitors perceive such a living religious-cultural landscape remain scarce. Methods: We analysed TripAdvisor reviews of Penglipuran as a religiously framed, cognitively and affectively mediated phenomenon. Of 512 reviews collected (2014–2025), 454 contained sufficient text for computational analysis (58 short entries were excluded); sentiment was scored with VADER and complemented by TextBlob, reviews were coded into Perception and Practice dimensions, and Perception-dimension reviews were modelled thematically with non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), validated against K-means and latent dirichlet allocation (LDA). Findings: Sentiment was strongly positive overall (95.8% positive; mean compound 0.751), and the Perception and Practice dimensions did not differ significantly. Three exploratory themes emerged, overall impression and hospitality, the bamboo forest, and a tension between authenticity and commercialization, which align with the three relations of Tri Hita Karana. Post-pandemic reviews were significantly less positive than pre-pandemic reviews, indicating that visitor sentiment was not unaffected by the tourism disruption. Conclusion: Penglipuran is received favourably, but its appeal rests on a communal and religious life-world that commercialization can erode; protecting community hospitality and ceremonial life, and developing the bamboo forest as a natural-cultural asset, may help sustain it. Because TripAdvisor users are not representative of all visitors, these implications are indicative rather than definitive. Novelty/Originality of this article: The study offers an integrated, reproducible pipeline for reading user-generated content as an empirical trace of religious-cultural tourist experience, bringing computational method (science) to the emotional construal (mind) of a Hindu-Balinese heritage landscape (religion).