‘Instant Noodle Crisis’: understanding tourist and public sentiments towards collective tourist environmentally irresponsible behaviour in a tourist destination in China

Limited studies have examined tourist and public sentiments towards tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour. This study used Python to mine and analyze online reviews from online travel agency websites and social networking sites to comprehend a specific event of tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour, the Laojun Mountain ‘Instant Noodle Crisis’ in China, which has triggered widespread online discussion. The findings are as follows: (1) Based on the event system theory, it showed that the evolutionary mechanisms of ‘Instant Noodle Crisis’ differ between online travel agency websites and social networking sites. (2) The results from keywords, semantic co-occurrence, and visual semantic association networks revealed that reviews on online travel agency websites focused on travel experiences and sights, with tourists rarely mentioned their own behaviour. In contrast, reviews on social networking sites concentrated on blame-assigning and cause-seeking. (3) Latent Dirichlet Allocations model analysis demonstrated that tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour decreased positive feelings and increased negative emotions among tourists and the public. This study explored the occurrence mechanisms, tourist and public attitudes and emotions, related to collective tourists’ environmentally irresponsible behaviour from a novel perspective. It offer insights for future academic research in the field and tourism destination management strategies.