Social media have become essential for firms in the hospitality industry to promote their brands, generate engagement and create sales. Using Facebook more than any other social media, hotels mobilise Facebook pages as platforms for communicating, interacting and networking with customers and potential guests, as well as for providing adequate content to consumers as an essential component of users' overall satisfaction. The aim of the study was to analyse the message strategy that hotels in different hotel classes use in content related to services offered by individual firms compared to content related to the destination. A total of 4,725 Facebook posts by hotels in Barcelona were analysed, and compositional data analysis was applied to account for the relative importance of different data (i.e. proportions of different types of content). Findings show that higher-class hotels promote themselves by highlighting their facilities, whereas lower-class hotels promote themselves by promoting the destination.
This paper showcases an exploratory study of the creation of a travel diary to facilitate the expression and reminiscences of memorable and meaningful moments using the traveller's digital footprints. Currently, personal technologies are widely used to capture these moments and the travel diary seems to be an ideal place to consolidate footprints from diverse sources. In this study, the researcher interviewed participants, asked them to share their memorable and meaningful travel experiences, and then instructed them to use their photos to create a paper-based visual diary. This study adopted a Labovian approach to compare the oral narratives with the visual diaries. Based on the results, the researcher makes recommendations regarding the future design of travel diary platforms.
The link between information privacy concerns and privacy behaviours has been a focus of extensive investigation in various disciplines. However, little attention has been devoted to this issue in the tourism literature. Spurred by technological development and shaped by tourism-related environments, emerging privacy issues call for comprehensive yet context-specific studies to ensure tourists are making beneficial privacy choices. This paper first presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research on privacy concerns and behaviours. Then, it suggests a list of overarching research priorities, merging social and technical aspects of privacy protection approaches as they apply to tourism. The priorities include research to measure tourists' privacy concerns, explore specific biases in tourists' privacy decisions, experiment with privacy nudges, and explore how to integrate privacy nudges in system design. Thus, this paper contributes to guiding the direction of future research on privacy protection in tourism.
The sharing economy rapidly led to changes within the travel accommodation service industry over the last decade. Because of these changes, reviews are becoming more and more important. Reviews are particularly useful for peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms, as they reflect past experience from other customers and, in most cases, they are the only source of information available. Since customers take these reviews into consideration in their travel planning, understanding the composition of customer experience and feelings in the rating process is essential. Literature shows that there are different consequences of emotionality expressed in reviews. Thus, this paper explores the relationship between different lodging aspects and their roles in the formation of emotional content in reviews. This is achieved by exploring emotional expressions in reviews to reveal which criteria evoke which kind of emotions. In this way, a more precise customer sentiment understanding is derived. The findings provide a new angle on investigating customer behaviour.
The purpose of this study is to empirically test a model that examines the roles of offline activities and customer value creation on tourists' continuance use of online travel communities (OTCs). Hypotheses were tested through a sample of 251 respondents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). SmartPLS structural equation modelling was used to test the structural model. Results indicated that offline activities significantly influence hedonic and social values, while this support was not found with functional value. Similarly, while offline activities positively influence continuance usage intention, no positive relationship was established between offline activities and recommendation intention. Additionally, the three dimensions of customer value creation positively influenced continuance usage intention. This study suggests that in planning offline activities, managers of OTCs must understand the dynamics of customer value creation in order to enhance social bonds among members and continuous usage of the OTC.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have a great potential to aid not only in promoting tourism products and services, but also in influencing responsible travel behaviour to support sustainability. The effectiveness of using AI for positive behaviour change interventions depends on consumers' attitudes toward AI. This study found three underlying views of AI impacts: Beneficial AI, Destructive AI, and Risky AI. Based on these, three consumer segments were identified: The Laggards, The Aficionados, and The Realists. The first two segments hold opposing views: the former averaging higher in negative impacts, while the latter in positive impacts of AI. The Realists are aware of both benefits and risks of AI. These segments differ in their intention to follow recommendations from AI. It is suggested that mainstream consumers, those belonging to The Realists, are likely to respond positively to AI systems recommending responsible behaviour, signifying the positive role of AI in sustainable tourism.
Research has not investigated the use of competitions-hackathons as a citizen engagement tool to motivate and activate citizen’s engagement in entrepreneurship driving sustainable tourism development. This paper fills in this gap by using the SHARE Challenge as a case study. SHARE is a competition-based crowdsourcing project launched by the Government of South Australia aiming to engage citizens in sharing economy entrepreneurial ventures. The competition received 88 eligible ideas from different stakeholders, and the study conducted a content analyses of these ideas for investigating the profile of the citizens and the type of the sharing economy ideas that were inspired by the SHARE. Tourism was found to be the sector attracting most of the submitted ideas for starting-up a sharing economy entrepreneurial venture aiming to make sustainable use of tourism resources. The findings provide evidence on how SHARE has ‘educated’, inspired, and activated the citizens to engage in sustainable entrepreneurship.
Trust-free and trust-regulated systems based on blockchain technology (BCT) are currently experiencing the maximum hype and promise to revolutionise entire domains. Tourism products (intangible services) are highly dependent on trust and reputation management that is traditionally centralised and delegated to "expected" reliable third-parties (e.g., TripAdvisor). Although BCT has only recently started approaching the tourism industry and being employed in real-world applications, the scientific community has already been extensively exploring the promises of BCT. Therefore, there is an impending need for organising and understanding current knowledge and formalise societal, scientific, and technological challenges of applying BCT in the tourism industry. This paper moves the first step, presenting a systematic scientific literature review of studies involving BCT for tourism purposes. Providing a comprehensive overview, actors, assumptions, requirements, strengths, and limitations characterising the state of the art are analysed. Finally, advantages and future challenges of applying BCT in the tourism area are discussed.
A novel recommender system that supports tourists in choosing interesting and novel points of interests (POIs) is here presented. It can deal with situations where users’ data is scarce and there is no additional information about users apart from their past POIs visits. User behaviour is modelled by first clustering users with similar POIs visit trajectories and then learning a general user behaviour model, which is common to all the users in the same cluster, via Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). Finally, recommendations are generated by exploiting the learnt behavioural models. The analysis of the produced clusters of trajectories and the generated recommendation shows that the proposed approach outperforms a baseline kNN model along several dimensions except precision.
Rating-based summary statistics have become ubiquitous, and of key relevance to compare offers on booking platforms. Largely left unexplored, however, is the issue to what extent the descriptives of rating distributions influence the decision making of online consumers. In this work a conjoint experiment was eye-tracked to explore how different attributes of these rating summarisations, such as the mean rating value, the bimodality of the ratings distribution as well as the overall number of ratings impact users' decision making. Furthermore, participants' maximising behavioural tendencies were analysed. Depending on their scores on Decision Difficulty, participants were guided by different patterns in their assessment of the characteristics of rating summarisations, and in the intensity of their exploration of different choice options.
Live-streaming has become popular worldwide as digital solutions provide ever creative opportunities to bring activities in life that were previously impossible. Travel is one of the most favourable activities on live-streaming. Live-streaming tourism (LST) recognised as a distinct information and communication technology (ICT) phenomenon. However, research in LST remains under-explored. This study sheds light on live-streaming tourism, to develop a systematic review on live-streaming tourism, and propose the blended tourism experiencescape model to address the absence of live-streaming tourism from a theoretical perspective. The future research directions and agenda are also provided.
In the field of destination branding, some researchers have conducted comparative studies for the development of the customer-based brand equity measurement. Since brand equity is a relative measure, it is required to compare a brand to another to measure its effectiveness. However, the selection process of destinations for the comparison has been highly depending on the subjectivity of researchers. This study proposes to use of online travel reviews to identify a pair of similar destinations addressing what tourists have talked about the destinations by aiming at contributing to developing a reliable brand equity measurement. The study takes Okinawa (Japan) as a case in the destination brand category of "island resort destination", and the result indicates that Corsica (France) is the most similar destination among nine European destinations. Future research should develop scale items and test the reliability and the validity of them using the two destinations identified in this study.
This study explored the extent to which the antecedents (psychological anxiety, behavioural anxiety, need for virtual comfort and security, and need for disconnectedness) impact smartphone usage while traveling, and the extent to which smartphone usage impacts travel efficacy and experience. Structural equation modelling was employed to analyse the data collected through a structured questionnaire from 227 Indian Millennials. The findings suggest that the need for virtual comfort & security and behavioural anxiety positive influence smartphone use while traveling, while psychological anxiety, and need for disconnectedness were found to have no significant impact. Further, smartphone use while traveling was found to have a strong impact on the travel efficacy and experience of users.
In an increasingly digitised and globalised world, a new type of business tourism has emerged, undertaken by the digital nomad (DN). Tourism operators and government agencies are increasingly seeking to attract DNs. Yet, knowledge about DNs is often based on reports that focus on glamorous aspects of the DN lifestyle whilst glossing over the negative realities of DN lifestyles. This study addresses this gap by adopting a retrospective autoethnographical approach that provides a more holistic understanding of DN life. The study collects and critically reflects on a vast amount of data related to various events and observations associated with the lead researcher's experience of living as a DN. Sans gloss, the study's findings reveal the characteristic motivations, mobility and work practices of DNs, discusses the implications of DNs for tourism practitioners that seek to attract DNs, and recommends future areas of research.
While hospitality has been one of the industries that have been keen to adopt and use various technologies, the proliferation of gamification application is still to materialise. It is therefore very interesting to investigate the potential benefits of gamified applications for both demand and supply in the area of the hospitality industry by identifying the motives of individuals' when they use a hotel-gamified application. Since fun has become the requirement to ensure continuous demands for many products or services, companies and organizations feel the need to involve fun in their offerings to secure continuity in consumption and use. Hence, this study aims to understand the meaning of fun for individuals when they will use a hotel-gamified application. Visual material was prepared so the interviewees would have an idea of how a hotel-gamified application would look if it were in existence today based on the current definitions of gamification.
Writing style is an important rhetorical feature of textual information. However, its value has not yet been well understood within the context of social media. This research compares two major aspects of textual content, i.e., content and style, to determine the information value of online hotel reviews. Using TripAdvisor hotel reviews, several machine learning techniques based on natural language processing (NLP) are applied to predict review helpfulness. The results indicate that textual features are core features of online reviews; that style is a more influential aspect than content; and, that combining both features produces the best results. This study contributes to the understanding of user-generated content in the textual format within the hospitality and tourism contexts. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.
The aim of this study was to explore UK residents’ opinions of how peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation listings within their communities impact upon their quality of life (QoL). Seven hundred and eighty open-ended questions were collected across the UK and content analysis was conducted to investigate the textual data. It is found that 13% of UK residents held positive opinion on P2P accommodation whereas another 13% expressed negative attitude and the rest kept neutral opinions. More people believed P2P accommodation brought positive economic and negative environmental impacts on the QoL, while the social influence was neutral. Opinions of London residents on P2P accommodation are different from those of non-London residents. Practical implications are provided to policymakers based on the empirical findings.
Social media and the power of word-of-mouth (WOM) have resulted in the rise of user-generated content (UGC) which thereby created prominent users who have congregated their own clout of followers as opinion leaders of the new digital century – social media influencers (SMIs). Becoming an integral player in the marketing industry in Singapore, Destinations Management/Marketing Organisations (DMOs) are recognising the influential power of SMIs, employing them as part of its integrated marketing strategy to increase inbound tourism. However, effectiveness of SMI marketing, even more so, social media campaign of a DMO has been minimally examined. Thus, to evaluate the effectiveness of the SMI marketing campaign executed by Hokkaido Tourism Organization, factor analysis and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is used. This study suggests that SMI marketing is effective in changing attitude among consumers, especially on destination image, which would consequently affect the consumers’ travel intention and intention to do word-of-mouth.
Sharing/platform economy takes place when users offer products and services through online platforms. In the case of tourism, the terms collaborative tourism and sharing (peer-to-peer) accommodations are commonly used. Since providing services through online platforms can be done by anyone without specific qualifications, it has been stated that the sharing economy is accessible to everyone who has goods to share or spare time available. Although this is true from a generic perspective, not all available offers receive the same attention from consumers. This research uses a dataset with all the properties offered in Spain on Airbnb to analyse differences in prices, demand, and guest satisfaction. It considers factors including neighbourhoods, and on whether the host is an amateur or a professional. The research also analyses the contents of user complaints. Results show that the platform economy is less egalitarian than some discourses about this economy suggest.
The actuality of the double gender gap, that confirms the under-representation in both decision-making and technological positions, has been hardly analysed in the tourism industry. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify women's position in top management positions in some of the most important tourism-high technological organisations and to evaluate these organisations' actions towards the improvement of women's participation. The analysis combines NASDAQ corporation data with content analysis on annual reports and corporate websites. Results confirm a low participation of women in NASDAQ tourism-technology board of director's corporations and companies increasing steps towards women incorporation in decision making positions. Results show that though there are important disparities among organisations, there is a direct relationship between the implementation of specific programs to increase women's participation in the organisation's decisions and the percentage of women on Board of Directors, the highest decision-making level.
