Tourist satisfaction as a causal system: evidence from platform-mediated private-group tours

Understanding how tourist satisfaction forms in platform-mediated tourism remains limited, particularly in customized tour services where experiences are co-created across multiple actors. Using user-generated reviews from a major Chinese online travel platform, this study examines satisfaction in online private group tours by combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract experience-related attributes with the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to model their causal relationships. The results reveal a hierarchical influence structure in which core service resources act as primary drivers of downstream interactions and experiential evaluations, while personalized service and emotional value function mainly as integrative outcomes. The findings contribute by demonstrating that tourist satisfaction emerges from an interdependent causal system rather than isolated attributes.