Seaward we go, does joy then grow? The spatiotemporal dynamics of tourist emotions in coastal destinations

Coastal tourism holds tremendous development potential, yet faces a critical paradox under the experience economy: while demand grows, inadequate tourist experiences increasingly constrain its sustainable development. This study selects Qingdao as a representative coastal destination and integrates online travelogue analysis, affective semantic processing, and GIS techniques to examine tourists’ spatiotemporal trajectories and emotional dynamics, informing improvements in the tourist experience. Findings challenge the linear assumption that “seaward we go, joy then grows”: while tourists exhibit a strong orientation toward the coast, positive emotions do not consistently increase with proximity to the sea. Instead, emotional responses show a nonlinear pattern, scattered nearshore and rising at certain distances, revealing a complex human-coast relationship. Emotional experiences are shaped through embodied, multimodal interactions with spatial features (natural and cultural landscapes), environmental quality (weather, sand texture), spatial constraints (crowding), and spatial order (chaos or control). Tourist mobility reconstructs this relationship, driving shifts in embodied interaction and emotional variability. This research contributes to the theoretical understanding of spatiotemporal emotional experience in coastal tourism and offers insights for experience design and destination management.