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.
