Coupling Mechanism and Driving Paths of the Spatial Differentiation of Tourism Attractions from the Perspective of Tourist Perception—A Case Study of Xinjiang, China

Abstract

As the culture and tourism industry moves toward high-quality development, tourist perception has become a core dimension for measuring that quality. Most existing work on tourism spatial differentiation still looks at the supply side, and describes the pattern of tourism attractions. It pays limited attention to how supply and demand couple with each other, and it offers little systematic evidence from large-scale, highly heterogeneous regions. This study combines multi-source tourism point data with review texts from Trip.com (hereafter, Trip) and Rednote (Xiaohongshu). Using RoBERTa-wwm, a pretrained Chinese language model with whole-word masking, together with a coupling-coordination model and the geographical detector, we analyze how the spatial differentiation of tourism attractions couples with tourist perception, and we trace the driving mechanism to land resources, tourism resources and socioeconomic conditions. The results show that tourist sentiment perception in Xinjiang forms a spatial pattern that is led by core cities and declines outward layer by layer, and the coupling coordination between the distribution of tourism attractions and tourist sentiment perception remains higher in the north and lower in the south. The two systems do not, however, follow a simple linear relation: infrastructure coverage emerges as the strongest correlate of coordination, whereas regional economy and population size explain it only weakly. This study therefore extends the demand-side perspective in research on tourism spatial differentiation, and it offers a scientific basis and a decision-making reference for large-scale regions that seek to optimize tourism spatial layout and to upgrade the industrial quality.