Cultural festival appeal across visitor familiarity through Instagram captions

Festival appeal is often treated as a static pull factor, limiting insight into how cultural festivals are experienced across visitor familiarity. This research note examines how appeal is articulated across first-time, second-time, and regular visitation as publicly narrated in Instagram captions. Using Reflexive Thematic Analysis, it analyzes 962 publicly available Instagram captions posted from 2023 to 2024 about Panagbenga, Sinulog, and Kadayawan Festivals. Findings identify awescape, where first-time visitors emphasize visual spectacle and activities that elicit awe, curiosity, and delight; delvescape, where second-time visitors foreground host communities, locals, atmosphere, and social connection; and steadyscape, where regular visitors value innovation and sensory-memory cues, including taste, smell, and sound. The study contributes a bounded, caption-derived visitor-lifecycle typology of cultural festival appeal for experience design, audience segmentation, and visitor retention strategies, while recognizing that Instagram posts tend to foreground enjoyable, memorable, and socially desirable festival experiences.