Voices from the wild: a netnographic analysis of visitor narratives and sustainability discourses in Nepal's nature-based tourism destinations

Purpose This article analyzes visitor-generated online narratives to identify dominant experience themes across six nature-based tourism (NBT) destinations in Nepal and how travelers perceive and articulate sustainability. Design/methodology/approach A netnographic design is applied to 1,740 validated online reviews drawn from a publicly available Kaggle dataset of Nepal tourist reviews, spanning Wildlife (Chitwan, Bardiya), High-Altitude Trekking (Langtang, Annapurna Base Camp, Everest Base Camp) and Lake & Landscape (Pokhara). Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling sorts reviews into sub-categories, interpreted through content and keyword-in-context analysis. Findings Three thematic groups emerged. Wildlife narratives comprised encounter drama, conservation ethics and protected-area tensions, and Tharu cultural immersion. Trekking narratives produced endurance as transformation; landscape, solitude and spiritual resonance; and environmental attentiveness and trail ethics. Pokhara narratives yielded curated recreational nature at the lake-mountain interface and Pokhara as urban gateway. Sustainability discourse was strongest and most embodied among trekkers, weakest at Pokhara, appearing as aesthetic cleanliness rather than ecological ethics. Practical implications Policymakers should adopt differentiated, segment-aligned strategies: conservation messaging in safari products, waste and trail infrastructure in trekking regions and sustainable urban planning for gateway Pokhara. Originality/value Prior research treated NBT as one category, single sites or solicited surveys. This study compares visitor discourse across three destination types within one country and offers a replicable LDA-netnographic approach with management recommendations.