Using ontology-based clustering to understand the push and pull factors for British tourists visiting a Mediterranean coastal destination

This paper studies why British tourists decide to travel to a particular destination in a Catalan region. The analysis is based on a survey that includes open-ended questions. First, we propose the operationalization of the concepts of motivation and meaning as push-pull factors when choosing a destination. Second, an ontology-based clustering method is presented, which makes it possible to analyse these qualitative factors from a semantic perspective to obtain tourist segments. A benchmark confirms that the segmentation obtained is better than that generated using classic clustering methods The results show that different meanings can be associated with any single place.