Abstract

In this digital age, online reviews of tourist destinations travel fast and far, and word of mouth information can affect the reputation of the sites and their perceived sociocultural significance. For heritage sites of war and human suffering where their raison-d’être lies in their mission to pass on the memory, the stakes are high. What makes up the content of tourist reviews and do they change over time? What motivates tourists to write online reviews? Are the intended messages transmitted from the stakeholders of the memorial site to the tourists, and under what condition and in what context? These questions are explored in this empirical study that focuses on the UNESCO World Heritage site, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in the Peace Park and its Peace Memorial Museum. Using interdisciplinary analytics, we scrutinised the text and context of online reviews of this heritage site over ten consecutive years. The results disclosed that peace messages associated with the heritage site are indeed transmitted to the tourists under a set of specific conditions, where they spontaneously pass on the message online as if they are owners of the legacy themselves, and the motivation for this tourist behaviour is discussed.