Sampieri, S.; Saoualih, A.; Safaa, L.; Martinez de Carnero Calzada, F.; Ramazzotti, M.; Martínez-Peláez, A. Tourism Development through the Sense of UNESCO World Heritage: The Case of Hegra, Saudi Arabia. Heritage2024, 7, 2195-2216.
Sampieri, S.; Saoualih, A.; Safaa, L.; Martinez de Carnero Calzada, F.; Ramazzotti, M.; Martínez-Peláez, A. Tourism Development through the Sense of UNESCO World Heritage: The Case of Hegra, Saudi Arabia. Heritage 2024, 7, 2195-2216.
Sampieri, S.; Saoualih, A.; Safaa, L.; Martinez de Carnero Calzada, F.; Ramazzotti, M.; Martínez-Peláez, A. Tourism Development through the Sense of UNESCO World Heritage: The Case of Hegra, Saudi Arabia. Heritage2024, 7, 2195-2216.
Sampieri, S.; Saoualih, A.; Safaa, L.; Martinez de Carnero Calzada, F.; Ramazzotti, M.; Martínez-Peláez, A. Tourism Development through the Sense of UNESCO World Heritage: The Case of Hegra, Saudi Arabia. Heritage 2024, 7, 2195-2216.
Abstract
This study explores the perception of a “sense of place” among tourists visiting Hegra, an
archaeological site in northern Saudi Arabia, through reviews on TripAdvisor. The 267 reviews reviewed on TripAdvisor between 2020 and 2023 were analyzed with the VADER sentiment po-larity analysis tool and object modeling using the NMF machine learning algorithm. The results highlight positive factors linked to the history and uniqueness of the place while showing some critical issues related to isolation, cost, privatization, and competitiveness. The originality of the research lies in the type of case study chosen, an archaeological site of a country that has recently opened its doors to tourism, and in the pragmatic nature of the investigation, oriented towards the search for possible solutions to be adopted in terms of heritage management based on the feedback received for the development of the tourist destination.
Keywords
Sense of place, archaeological heritage sites, UNESCO world heritage sites, VADER-based sen-timent analysis, Non-negative Matrix Factorization, Hegra, TripAdvisor, Saudi Arabia.
Subject
Arts and Humanities, Archaeology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
