Destination Image of DMO and UGC on Instagram: A Machine-Learning Approach

Social media plays a key role in shaping the image of a destination. Although recent research has investigated factors influencing online users’ perception towards destination image, limited studies encompass and compare social media content shared by tourists and destination management organisations (DMOs) at the same time. This paper aims to determine whether the projected image of DMOs corresponds with the destination image perceived by tourists. By taking the Austrian Alpine resort Saalbach-Hinterglemm as a case, a netnographic approach was applied to analyse the visual and textual posts of DMO and user-generated content (UGC) on Instagram using machine learning. The findings reveal themes that are not covered in the posts published by marketers but do appear in UGC. This study adds to the existing literature by providing a deeper insight into destination image formation and uses a qualitative approach to assess destination brand image. It further highlights practical implications for the industry regarding DMOs’ social media marketing strategy.

Navigation by Revealing Trade-offs for Content-Based Recommendations

Conversational recommender systems have been introduced to provide users the opportunity to give feedback on items in a turn-based dialog until a final recommendation is accepted. Tourism is a complex domain for recommender systems because of high cost of recommending a wrong item and often relatively few ratings to learn user preferences. In a scenario such as recommending a city to visit, conversational content-based recommendation may be advantageous, since users often struggle to specify their preferences without concrete examples. However, critiquing item features comes with challenges. Users might request item characteristics during recommendation that do not exist in reality, for example demanding very high item quality for a very low price. To tackle this problem, we present a novel conversational user interface which focuses on revealing the trade-offs of choosing one item over another. The recommendations are driven by a utility function that assesses the user’s preference toward item features while learning the importance of the features to the user. This enables the system to guide the recommendation through the search space faster and accurately over prolonged interaction. We evaluated the system in an online study with 600 participants and find that our proposed paradigm leads to improved perceived accuracy and fewer conversational cycles compared to unit critiquing.

An Empirical Study on the Impact of Prior Information Provision Methods on Participants’ Perceptions in Tasting Marketing

Tasting events are a typical example of a tourism experience that utilizes alcohol. However, it has not been sufficiently demonstrated how the prior information given to customers at tasting events affects their perception of the tasting and its marketing effects. In this study, we conducted a tasting experiment of a new Japanese sake product in California, the USA to clarify how information given to participants in advance can affect their perception of the tasting, satisfaction, and word-of-mouth intention related to the new sake product, and compared the effects of the following types of prior information: 1) no information, 2) written information, 3) video explained by a man, and 4) video explained by a woman. The results show that presenting information makes a difference in its impact as opposed to providing no information. When prior information was presented in written form, various perspectives significantly influenced the satisfaction and recommended intention more than in the cases of video. On the other hand, in the cases of video, the number of significant paths was reduced, but the influence on word-of-mouth intention was greater than in the case of written information. This study contributes to the development of a theory and empirical evidence that takes into account prior information in tasting marketing in tourism.

Towards a Strengths-Based Personal Informatics Framework for Transformative Tourism Experiences: A Phenomenological Study on Serious Leisure Practitioners

Personal technology plays an integral role in shaping people’s quality of life which includes leisure and tourism experiences. A number of personal informatics tools can support people in performing their activities by collecting biometric and environmental data; however, little is known regarding the use of psychological data to enrich leisure and tourism experiences. To address this research gap, this study aims to propose a conceptual framework that fosters memorable and meaningful leisure experiences (MMEs) based on theories from serious leisure and positive psychology. In particular, this study probes into the MMEs of serious leisure practitioners who put their efforts and resources into pursuing intrinsically rewarding leisure activities. Excelling at these activities, which may draw upon participants’ character strengths, yields sustained fulfillment which fosters personal transformation. The idiosyncratic nature of MMEs demands a phenomenological inquiry that involves in-depth interviews concerning the character strengths used and their development trajectories. Using theory triangulation from both positive psychology and serious leisure allows researchers to gain a holistic view of participants’ well-being. Character strengths were found to be the integral factors that contribute to MMEs at different stages of leisure activities. The result identified three aspects of strengths used: strengths well spent, reflection and introspection, and anticipation of the future self, which informs the development of a strengths-based personal informatics framework for leisure and tourism.

Leveraging Blockchain in Medical Tourism Value Chain

There are significant challenges facing the medical tourism industry: privacy and transparency concerns, lack of access to centralized medical records, fraudulent practices, opportunistic behavior of intermediaries, foreign currency risks, and contractual/legal issues. While blockchain technology has immense potential to address the industry’s inherent challenges and inefficiencies, the current understanding of blockchain application in medical tourism is fragmented. Through a pragmatic review of the literature, this study explores the blockchain applications and benefits for medical tourists across the stages of the medical tourism value chain, and in the process, proposes a meaningful and managerially relevant blockchain framework for medical tourism. The findings and the proposed novel framework to guide policy interventions and support mechanisms to take advantage of the full opportunities of blockchain in medical tourism.

Identifying the Main Service Elements for Customer-Oriented Live Guided Virtual Tours

Virtual tourism allows people to see and experience the world without physically travelling to the destination. The objective of this study is to identify service elements critical to the development of customer-oriented live guided virtual tours. A total of three focus group discussions were conducted, with 4–5 participants in each group. All the participants were Japanese who had previously participated in live guided virtual tours. The data was analysed with qualitative content analysis, where an inductive approach was used. The findings reveal that the main expectations of the participants are related to experiencing the local culture and way of life, feeling of actually being in the destination (sense of connection), social interaction and active participation. These factors make the virtual tour feel realistic and attractive and the tourism businesses need especially to focus on these when designing virtual tours for example by providing ample opportunities for the virtual tour participants to discuss with each other and learn from each other. This study brings valuable insights into the virtual tours research from the customer perspective, especially in a non-Western context.

The Usage of Emoji in Tourism-Related Instagram Posts: Suggestions from a Marketing Perspective

The relevance of emoji in social media marketing has attracted tremendous interest from academics and marketing professionals alike ever since emoji became a fixed component in user-to-user and business-to-user communication on online platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Using a quantitative research approach in the form of a self-administered online survey in an experimental setting, the purpose of this study is to investigate what type of emoji positively impacts consumer behaviour, purchase intention, and user interaction in tourism-related Instagram posts. This research is novel in that it bridges the usage of emoji in the context of social media and tourism. The findings support tourism managers in the practical use of emoji for social media marketing campaigns on Instagram and show that (positive) face emoji evoke more positive emotions than non-face emoji.

Virtual Reality: A Simple Substitute or New Niche?

Since 2020, the tourism industry worldwide has been devastated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments across the globe imposed strict national lockdowns in order to curb the spread of the pandemic, with negative effects on tourism. This forced many tourism companies and organizations to turn to virtual reality (VR) to survive. As a consequence, numerous tourism scholars began to question whether VR would replace conventional tourism after COVID-19. The study aims is to address this concern and to determine if VR will be a substitute for conventional tourism or whether it can be considered as a tourism niche. It is a conceptional study which adopts a comparative analysis of conventional tourism models and VR. It uses two popular conventional tourism models, namely N. Leiper’s (1979) tourism system model and R.W. Butler’s (1980) destination life-cycle model. Based on this analysis, this paper suggests that VR will never be a substitute for conventional tourism, but should rather be considered a future tourism niche.

Platform Stress in Hospitality – Focusing on the Technology dimension

For the emergence of platform business, it is important to manage the stress that hosts receive from the business. Considering the characteristics of the platform business, stressors arise from social and technology dimension. In the global platform business (e.g., Airbnb), social dimension stressors mostly arise from the relationships among stakeholders, and technology dimension stressors arise from the system they utilize. This research aims to define this combination of social and technology stress as “Platform Stress.” Especially focusing on the technology dimension, this research empirically verified the relations of techno-stressors, burnout, and switching intention. Further, mediating effects of burnout in between the relationships demonstrates the importance of investigating the hosts’ stress. Exploring the platform stress from the technology-usage perspective, this research provides theoretical and managerial implications.

Beyond Influencer Credibility: The Power of Content and Parasocial Relationship on Processing Social Media Influencer Destination Marketing Campaigns

The power of social media influencers (SMIs) as effective endorsers for destinations and tourism products have been widely acknowledged. Despite being characterised as content generators by prior research, little has been done to examine how consumers perceive content produced by SMI, a key component of destination marketing campaigns. Moreover, parasocial relationship between SMI and the follower has been proven to enhance the persuasive impact of SMIs. Hence, this study aims to shed light on how consumers would assess the SMI and the content the SMI produced, as well as the effect of parasocial relationship on processing SMI destination marketing campaigns. Findings (N = 501) have highlighted that argument quality of SMI content has a stronger direct impact on campaign attitude, destination image and travel intention, as compared to source credibility. With the application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as a framework, this study illuminates consumers’ interaction with the SMI destination marketing campaign and extends prior studies in understanding the importance of SMI content and parasocial relationship as a significant tool for future destination marketing.