Understanding how destination attributes shaping tourist visitation on cultural routes through social media data and interpretable machine learning

Abstract Cultural routes, once valued as heritage corridors, are increasingly experienced as tourism destinations composed of multiple attractions. Unlike work centered on tourists’ subjective motivations, this study examines how objective destination attributes shape tourist visitation along routes. Using the Kumano Kodo (Japan), 24,569 geo-tagged Flickr records quantify visitation patterns. Topic modeling of textual descriptions in the same records identifies 17 destination attributes, grouped