From Disruption to Recovery: A Social Big Data Analysis of Sport Tourism Discourse During and After COVID-19

This study investigates how online discourse on sport tourism was structured during the COVID-19 pandemic and reshaped as tourism entered a period of recovery and restructuring. The analysis covered two three-year periods: 1 July 2020–30 June 2023, representing the pandemic and early recovery period, and 1 July 2023–30 June 2026, representing the post-pandemic recovery and restructuring period. Unstructured online texts related to sport tourism were collected and processed through text cleaning, morphological analysis, and stop-word removal. The 50 core keywords identified for each period were then examined using frequency analysis, degree and closeness centrality, semantic network visualization, and convergence of iterated correlations (CONCOR) analysis. During the first period, the discourse was largely organized around travel, hotels, tourism destinations, domestic tourism, facility operation, and outdoor or participatory leisure activities. In the second period, regional destinations, marine and water-based leisure, festivals, sport competitions, booking and ticketing, accommodation, and spectatorship became more prominent. CONCOR analysis further revealed four clusters in each period. The first-period clusters concerned destination and marine leisure tourism, regional sport events and industry support, facility operation and COVID-19 response, and active outdoor participation. The second-period clusters focused on marine and destination-based leisure experiences, the recovery of sport events and spectator tourism, regional sport facilities and support programs, and booking-, accommodation-, and consumption-related activities. Taken together, the findings indicate that online sport tourism discourse moved from a pandemic-era structure centered on domestic travel, outdoor participation, and operational concerns toward a more diversified configuration linking regional destinations, marine leisure, event resumption, spectatorship, and tourism consumption. The study contributes to sport tourism research by showing how participation, spectatorship, destination experience, accommodation, and consumption are connected within a broader discourse structure.