Perceptions on Cultural Ecosystem Services of World Cultural Heritages in Beijing: A cross-cultural Comparison of Social Media-based Online Reviews and Images

Abstract

This study introduces an innovative approach combining social media text and image comments to quantify the perceptual differences of cultural ecosystem services among various sociocultural groups. For five World Heritage Sites in Beijing, natural-language processing classifies visitor perceptions using social media comments and image data, and importance-performance analysis quantifies the differences between Chinese and international visitor perceptions of these cultural ecosystem services. For the six perceived cultural ecosystem service categories, cross-cultural and local visitors exhibit the same satisfaction trends. In particular, international tourists assign higher importance scores for a given cultural ecosystem service than Chinese tourists. The proposed methods incur a lower cost than traditional methods and acquire large volumes of broad-ranging data. Additionally, the importance of‒the performance analysis data-acquisition method is improved. Moreover, World Heritage Site sustainability can be promoted by understanding the different heritage tourism perceptions of different cultural groups. Furthermore, this study provides valuable insights for decision-makers to improve tourism management and conservation strategies.