What Wellness Tourists Value: An eWOM-Based Examination of Healing Experiences in South Korea

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Wellness tourism is a rapidly expanding sector, yet limited research has examined healing-oriented wellness experiences through electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). This study investigates what wellness tourists value in healing experiences in South Korea by analyzing 4,214 English-language Google Reviews from 12 w ellness and healing destinations using a quantitative text-mining approach.
Co-occurrence analysis, place-based mapping, rating-based satisfaction analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling were conducted using KH-Coder. The findings reveal that healing experiences are primarily evaluated as place-based and emotionally immersive, with spatial tranquility, spiritual atmosphere, natural environments, and temporal immersion emerging as core experiential dimensions. Place-based analysis highlights the importance of specific healing locations in shaping perceived healing value, while rating-based analysis shows an evaluative asymmetry: satisfaction is driven by intangible experiential qualities, whereas dissatisfaction is mainly associated with functional and economic constraints. Topic modeling confirms the multidimensional nature of healing experiences, integrating environmental, spiritual, temporal, and lifestyle-related elements. This study contributes to wellness tourism and eWOM literature by empirically distinguishing healing-focused wellness tourism from general wellness services and offering practical insights for wellness destination management.