Identifying the Factors Influencing Chinese Glamping Booking Based on Online Review Mining: From the Moderating Effect of External Environment Perceptions

Glamping has recently become increasingly popular, and the competition in glamping market is more and more intense. The key for glamping business to enhance customer experience and obtain competitive advantages is to investigate glampsite characteristics that influence customers’ booking decisions under various external settings. This paper examines the moderating effects of COVID-19 and weather as external environmental factors on the relationship between negative rates of glampsite attributes and bookings. First, basic data about these glampsites and online reviews on the Qunar platform are collected. Second, glampsite attributes are mined from online reviews through BERTopic, and customers’ attention is subsequently calculated. Third, SnowNLP is utilized to determine the attribute sentiment score, and the negative rate of each attribute is subsequently calculated by combining the attention and sentiment scores. Finally, an ordered logistic regression model is built to investigate the effects of the negative rate of each attribute on glampsite bookings and the moderating effect of external environment perception. The findings indicate that: (1) Customers are interested in service, cleanliness, leisure activities, natural scenery, facilities, location, food, and cost performance ratio when choosing a glampsite. Bookings are significantly affected by negative rates of low cleanliness, bad natural scenery, unfavorable location, limited leisure activities, and inadequate facilities, all of which have a cascading negative impact. Customers are also more likely to choose glampsites with cleanliness, natural scenery, and leisure activities that meet their needs, rather than focusing on the location and facilities, when the demand for alternative glampsites is moderate. (2) The impact of location, leisure activities, and cleanliness negative review rates on reservations can be influenced by the customer’s perception of the external environment. Specifically, the customers’ perception of COVID-19 and weather both enhance the negative impact of leisure activity negative rates on bookings. COVID-19 perception amplifies the adverse effect of location negative rates on bookings, while weather perception mitigates the negative impact of cleanliness negative rates on bookings.