A Study on the Perception of Walkability in Tourist Attraction Places in Qatar using Text Mining Techniques

Walking is an important part of the tourist experience and comfort travel. There is increasing attention to encourage tourists to walk as a mode of sustainable transportation. Emergence of new and diverse forms of data has expand the field of research via text mining analysis. This is an alternative for common research methodology as a good analysis tool to reflect pedestrians’ opinions in spatial design and urban planning. In this regard, the novelty of this paper is to investigate the relationship between walkability and successful tourism in Doha, Qatar by utilizing text mining analysis on a readily available datasets, i.e. the customer generated contents from TripAdvisor. The collected data for tourist attractive places in Doha, Qatar shows higher frequency (connection) of words that reflect the characteristics of each research location and its respective relationship with public transportation (Doha Metro) to support the walkable environment. The findings have determined some users-friendly walking environment especially for research locations like The Pearl, Souq Waqif and Museum of Islamic Arts. On the other hand, it is indicated that the rate of Metro use is still low compared to the city’s population and this will take some time for Doha Metro to be used as main mode of transportation among the tourists. The outcome of this study will enable to propose some guidelines to enhance the walking environment for tourists within the challenging weather condition like hot and arid climate of Qatar.