1. Questions
Transport studies often treat mobility as overcoming distance, while tourism studies treat attractions as fixed places. Transport-tourism research complicates this separation by distinguishing transport for tourism from transport as tourism (Lumsdon and Page 2004; Rhoden and Kaaristo 2020). This distinction matters for cities where sightseeing buses, walking routes, cycling tours, ferries, trams, and scenic trains are marketed not only as ways to reach attractions but as experiences in their own right (Farías 2010; Larsen et al. 2021; Mertena and Kaaristo 2024; Pantelaki et al. 2023; Xu et al. 2018). Bandung, Indonesia, provides an illustrative setting: Bandros offers an urban sightseeing mobility case, heritage walking tours a documented place-based example (Wijaya and Wijayati 2024), and cycling a broader literature-based cross-mode illustration. This article asks: under what conditions can urban tourist transport be understood as an attraction rather than merely a mobility service?
2. Methods
This article combines concise conceptual synthesis with a short empirical illustration from an existing Bandros corpus. The synthesis selected sources that addressed transport as more than access, including movement, route design, vehicle identity, tourist gaze, narration, embodied mobility, or sustainability. The four conditions (mobile viewing, symbolic form, interpretation, and governance) were derived from the conceptual synthesis before examining the Bandros reviews. The empirical illustration used 457 public Google Reviews from five Bandros-related Google Maps listings, covering reviews posted from January 2019 to December 2025 and extracted on 2, 5, 6, and 7 January 2026. Bandros served as the empirical test case, while walking and cycling were literature-based cross-mode illustrations. Reviews were cleaned by excluding rating-only, empty, and off-topic entries.
Review valence used star ratings: 4–5 stars were classified as favourable, 3 as ambivalent, and 1–2 as negative; no keyword-based sentiment classifier was applied. Coding decisions were made manually in Microsoft Excel using an operational coding scheme; Excel was used to organise, record, and summarise coding decisions rather than automate code assignment. Each review could receive up to three primary codes and additional codes where relevant, allowing more than one condition per review. Condition prevalence was summarised using unique review counts and percentages; because conditions could co-occur, percentages were not mutually exclusive. The aim was not causal estimation, but an empirical plausibility check of the framework.
3. Findings
Four findings emerge. First, transport becomes attractive when movement is designed as a consumable sequence of urban views. Mobile viewing was identified in 184 reviews (40.3%): 171 favourable-rated (92.9%), 10 ambivalent (5.4%), and 3 negative (1.6%). Favourable accounts framed the bus as a way to see Bandung, enjoy the route, and experience the city atmosphere rather than merely move between points. As cross-mode illustrations, walking turns streets and heritage districts into sequential encounters, while cycling adds active, embodied viewing. In each case, the route becomes the core product.
Second, attraction value depends on symbolic and interpretive mediation. Bandros gains appeal through vehicle identity, city-branding potential, and narrated routes. Symbolic form and identity indicators appeared in 36 reviews (7.9%): 34 favourable-rated (94.4%), one ambivalent (2.8%), and one negative (2.8%). Interpretive content appeared in 116 reviews (25.4%): 112 favourable-rated (96.6%) and four ambivalent (3.4%), with no negative-rated reviews. Although less prevalent, symbolic references linked Bandros’s distinctive vehicle and identity with guided explanation, historical stories, and place-based learning. Walking and cycling respectively illustrate guided historical interpretation and active exploratory encounters.
Third, transport as attraction is mode-specific. The Bandros evidence foregrounds shared viewing and curated collective movement. Walking and cycling provide conceptual cross-mode illustrations rather than empirically equivalent comparisons: walking foregrounds proximity, conversation, and embodied heritage interpretation, whereas cycling highlights speed, effort, and active exploration. The attraction status of each mode is therefore conditional, not inherent. It emerges when mobility function, symbolic form, route experience, interpretation, and governance align.
Fourth, experience design is insufficient without service governance. Governance-related issues were identified in 157 reviews (34.4%): 113 favourable-rated (72.0%), 20 ambivalent (12.7%), and 24 negative (15.3%). Relative prevalence was higher in ambivalent or negative reviews (44/72; 61.1%) than in favourable reviews (113/385; 29.4%), especially for waiting and capacity, queue order, reliability, access, information, communication, and safety. This finding strengthens the transport lens: treating tourist transport only as a tourism product risks neglecting reliability, information, safety, and last-mile access; treating it only as transport misses its affective, symbolic, and educational value. As summarised in Table 1, the four conditions serve as empirical signals and planning tests. Experiential mobility infrastructure extends transport as tourism thinking by integrating symbolic, interpretive, and experiential qualities with the service-governance conditions that make movement accessible, legible, safe, and reliable. It therefore treats governance as part of producing and sustaining attraction value, not merely as operational support.
Data Availability
The empirical illustration uses public Google Reviews of Bandros. Raw review texts are not redistributed to reduce platform and privacy risks. The supplementary information provides the Google Maps listing identifiers, cleaning log, coding scheme, and a de-identified review-level coding matrix for the 457 retained reviews. The matrix includes star ratings, rating-based valence, source codes, and condition indicators, allowing the reported counts and percentages to be recalculated.
Ethics Statement
The analysis used non-reactive, publicly accessible user-generated content. Reviewer handles recorded in the source workbook are not reported in the article or supplementary information.
Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia (Kemendiktisaintek) through a doctoral research scholarship awarded to the first author under the Indonesian Education Scholarship (Beasiswa Pendidikan Indonesia, BPI) scheme [grant number 00537/BPPT/BPI.06/01/2025]. The scholarship is managed by the Center for Higher Education Funding and Assessment (PPAPT) and financed by the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or preparation of the manuscript.