Tourism Sustainability as a Spatially Situated Experience: Analysing TripAdvisor Narratives Across Marrakech’s Tourism Landscape

Tourism sustainability is commonly assessed at the destination level, leaving limited evidence on how visitors encounter it across different tourism spaces. This study examines sustainability as a spatially situated experience through 154,105 English-language TripAdvisor reviews of Marrakech posted between 2007 and 2024. A context-sensitive lexicon identified 5337 sustainability-related reviews, which were classified into environmental quality, socioeconomic and local relations, cultural heritage integrity, and visitor management and spatial pressure. Review texts were spatially anchored using explicit place cues, and chi-square tests compared dimension prevalence across six tourism contexts. BERTopic was then applied to 5634 extracted sustainability passages, and the resulting themes were linked to TripAdvisor ratings. Visitor management and spatial pressure was the most prevalent dimension, accounting for 37.06% of the corpus, followed by cultural heritage integrity at 31.52%. Gardens and monuments were dominated by congestion narratives, Medina and commercial settings by socioeconomic relations, and desert and mountain experiences by cultural heritage narratives. Four narrative configurations emerged. Cultural immersion and heritage stewardship received the highest mean rating of 4.80, whereas environmental degradation and animal welfare received the lowest at 2.55. The findings show that sustainability is experienced unevenly across a destination and that online reviews can support place-sensitive tourism management.