Spatiotemporal Differentiation and Cross-Scale Correlates of Tourist Perception in Mountain-Type and Rural Comprehensive Destinations: VGI Evidence from Shangrao, China

Abstract

As tourism shifts from sightseeing to experience-oriented consumption, understanding how tourist perception differs across heterogeneous destination types and spatial scales remains challenging. Using 23,439 Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) reviews archived for six destinations in Shangrao, China, this study compares mountain-type and rural comprehensive destination products. These are operational dominant-function categories rather than mutually exclusive geomorphological classes. The archive supports fine-grained sentiment, topic, and semantic-network analyses; annual temporal comparisons use the full 23,439-review corpus covering 2019–2025, whereas a separate subset of reviews posted from 1 August 2022 with official IP labels, aggregated into 2022–2024 province–year observations, supports Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (Pooled OLS) estimation. A hybrid lexicon–XLM-RoBERTa workflow, BERTopic, semantic co-occurrence analysis, and Pooled OLS are integrated in a cross-scale framework. Static results reveal shared strengths and weaknesses—high scenery and overall-experience evaluations but low price evaluations—alongside type-specific structures: mountain reviews concentrate on natural scenery, climbing effort, and accessibility, whereas rural reviews span village landscapes, cultural activities, accommodation, and nighttime experiences. Temporally, mountain demand retains a stable scenic core while accessibility concerns become more salient; rural demand shifts from traditional agricultural landscapes toward nighttime performances and other experience-oriented products. Cross-scale regressions identify destination- and dimension-specific correlates rather than causal drivers: urbanization is positively associated with several rural evaluations, while ecological contrast, climatic difference, and competing scenic resources are associated with more critical assessments in selected dimensions. The findings show that perception differences arise from the interaction of destination product structures and origin-region contexts, supporting differentiated accessibility management for mountain destinations and balanced product innovation, service improvement, and commercialization control for rural destinations.