Understanding tourists' experiences at war heritage sites in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam: a netnographic analysis of TripAdvisor reviews

This article examines tourists' experiences based on a content analysis of 23,640 online TripAdvisor reviews on the Cu Chi tunnels, one of the most well-known dark tourist sites in Vietnam. Using the netnography approach, we found that most online reviews are from inbound tourists. We identified several factors that impact tourists' perceptions, including tourists' underground experience, the content of war history, the tour guide's narrative talents, tourists' experience shooting weapons on-site, and the relative size of the crowd. Both positive and negative experiences were grouped into a few common categories. Based on our analysis, we observed that the current improvement of service quality, programmes, and presentations is not enough to transform tourists' experiences at the site. Rather, we discovered that the tourist also needs to be a co-creator of the experience. We draw out the findings to delineate their theoretical value and make inferences for the site management before concluding with a discussion of the study's limitations and suggestions for future research.