Local Accommodation Establishments' Strategies in Social Media

Tourism is a phenomenon of contemporary society, being one of the economic sectors where information has an essential function and where the impact of social media had more evidence. Digital technologies are increasingly present in life and have radically changed the way people think, make decisions and interact. Consumers are more demanding and informed, supporting their buying decisions in the online world. These changes also have implications in the tourism sector and in the promotion of tourist destinations. Given this new paradigm, the local accommodation units, as the most recent accommodation modality, have registered a remarkable growth and due to the characteristics of the activity itself, have to accompany and adapt to this new reality. The present work intends to analyze how Local Accommodation units in Aveiro use the Internet, and in particular the applications of social media in their communication strategies, as well as the importance they give to this reality of the digital world.

eWOW of Guests Regarding Their Hotel Experience

Online comments are increasingly mentioned as an important source of information, simplifying consumers' buying decisions. Online user-generated content has become one of the main sources of information for tourists, who themselves become creators of their own online content. This chapter focuses on sentiment analysis of comments made on TripAdvisor regarding one resort located in the Algarve region, in Portugal. The resort has good reviews, which means that the eWOM is positive. The highest scores relate to the resort's cleanliness, location and quality of sleep, and those that were less relevant were the value for money, the rooms and the service. The most dominant emotion is joy, followed by an analytical response. Negative emotions, such as sadness and anger, were not found very often in the online reviews. These results could be explained by the quality of the service, the kindness of the staff, the facilities for children, the entertainment, and the location, attributes that were often highlighted in the comments.

How Web 3.0 Tourism Students See the 1.0 Higher Education System

Social media does not seem to easily fit in the higher education system. The Web 3.0 students use social networks on a daily basis, however, 1.0 higher education institutions are not taking advantage of these tools. There are some institutional constraints, pedagogical issues, and cultural resistance for its adoption. A survey directed to Portuguese Higher Education students was held, aiming to identify social networks' use either in a personal and academic context. Results show that social networks are under-exploited in the teaching-learning process, both by students and also their teachers. They are both aware of the platforms and applications but are rarely used for an academic purpose. The study raises important issues and gives practical examples for effective use of social media in education. In order to address these challenges and opportunities wisely, it is necessary an effective engagement in social media by students, professors, and all the academic staff.

Impacts of Social Media on Business Value and Performance

The aim of this chapter is to study the main impacts of social media on business value and performance. ICT can be a resource in resource-based perspective, becoming itself a possible source of competitive advantage (in terms of performance and value creation). A proactively tailored organization strategy can drive the people, processes, and systems, harmoniously pulling all the stakeholders in unison. Social media can bring in the commitment of the workforce and ensure involved, flexible, innovative working practices, improving the quality of work. When properly used, they can build organizations to more flexible structures, sharing services, competitiveness and interdependencies. The business processes can be harmonized by standard operating procedures, automated systems of agreed quality, prime up the competency development and facilitate clear career paths. Refining suppleness to work in tune to market demands and supplementing employee satisfaction can foster the development of individual accountability leading to leadership evolution.

Deepening the Use of Social Media and Tourism Travel Behaviour

The Internet has transformed people's daily lives, not only in the search of information but above all giving the possibility of buying several products and services in a quick and easy way. Social networks have emerged as the quintessential medium for sharing experiences and communicating tourist information to all players in the tourism distribution chain. Today, we can sell, search, consume, connect, and share experiences related to our travel or services on different social media platforms and some online communities that share the same interests. The focus of this chapter is to point out the use of social media along the travel process in order to understand the behaviour of tourists before, during, and after trip. Having in mind the travel decision-making process the authors prepared a questionnaire with several questions spread through Facebook and answered by 95 people. The authors present the results and main conclusions in the chapter.

The Role of Social Media in Shaping Tourists' Travel Decisions

With increased economic and population growth, air connectivity, and travel facilities, international travel of Chinese citizens has tremendously increased. Although usually in groups, there has been a growing trend among Chinese tourists toward travelling independently. These independent travellers or so-called ‘new tourists' are highly exposed to new technologies and social media and prefer to do research about possible destinations, and new travel routes and activities that package tours usually do not include. This chapter examines how social media in general and WeChat, in particular, shapes the Chinese individual travellers' travelling decisions. As will be seen, while WeChat's popularity among the Chinese outbound tourists is largely attributed to its multi-functionality, its influences on their destination visitation choice are found in multiple levels: by providing illuminating information, allowing users to integrate their payment system easily to their bank accounts in China, and providing means to obtain discounts and promotional offers in a variety of ways.

Social Media Applied to Tourism and Hospitality

Online hotel reviews, ratings, or opinions have gained importance with the growth of social media tools. The objective of this chapter is to study the impact of specific satisfaction attributes on overall satisfaction. It is used a secondary data set obtained from three of the most influential online travel platforms, being analyzed the guests' average ratings for around 130 hotel units, distributed by four quality segments, located in the Porto metropolitan area. The application of this methodology to a large sample of Portuguese hotels has not been done before, been that the main contribution of this study. It is evidenced that the different platforms, while all incorporating consumer reviews as primary social knowledge, are distinct from each other on some aspects. The three platforms present roughly the same supply of hotels, albeit presenting some differences in terms of volume of data. In terms of specific attributes, with the exception of “service,” the three platforms present significant differences that may reflect the different user bases on these platforms.

Understanding the Role of Social Networks in Consumer Behavior in Tourism

This research seeks to understand the type of influence that the hotel sector in Portugal can achieve in its consumers, being the tourism sector an area in constant growth. To that end, a qualitative methodology was adopted, using semi-structured interviews, as a data collection tool to understand the type of use that hotels attribute to social networks, as well as the results obtained from their practices. In the investigation nine hotels were analyzed, presenting a diversified sample between the participants in terms of capacity, as well as recognition, proving that, in a general way, social networks help in the divulgation of the hotel, presenting these as a direct channel for consumers, facilitating brand exposure as well as interaction with customers.

The Importance of Social Media for the Improvement of the Tourist Experience Offered by Rural Tourism Enterprises

Social networks and the use of social media have been gaining more and more importance in recent years and have had a very significant impact on the tourism sector. The way this influences activity can be seen in two ways. On the one hand, from the point of view of the consumer himself, especially the way in which tourists access information. On the other hand, social networks are used by tourism companies as a means to support their marketing activities, such as the promotion of tourism products. This chapter explores how rural tourism companies use social media as a way to improve the tourist consumer experience. By assessing managers of the rural tourism businesses in the Alentejo Region, Portugal, the aim is to identify entrepreneurs' perceptions regarding the factors that influence the tourism experience, the use of social media and their relationship with the improvement of the tourist experience and customer loyalty. It is possible to conclude that rural tourism establishments are no longer ignoring the important role of social media in promoting their tourism experiences.

An Evaluation for Long-Haul Low-Cost Carriers Using User-Generated Content

Since the liberalization of the airline industry, the low-cost business model has been developed worldwide and a new business model of long-haul low-cost carriers (LHLCCs) has evolved. This chapter aims to investigate the LHLCC business model from a customer-oriented perspective in terms of service quality and perceived value. For this purpose, the authors investigated the effect of service quality on perceived value for money for LHLCCs. In this chapter, user-generated content was adopted to collect data, and 824 user-generated airline reviews were collected from TripAdvisor.com, the largest tourism-related repository. In order to investigate the relationship, a predictive correlational design was structured and a logistic regression analysis was applied. To contribute to the regression analysis, a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed to measure the classification success. As a result, the logit model describes well the relationship between variables for LHLCCs.