Search results

The purpose of this paper is to study tourists’ spatial and psychological involvement reflected through tourism destination image (TDI), TDI is divided into on-site and after-trip groups and the two groups are compared in the frame of three-dimensional continuums.

By conducting latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) modeling to tourism user-generated content, structural topic models are established. The topics separated out from unstructured raw texts are structural themes and representations of TDI. Social network analysis (SNA) reveals the quantitative and structural differences of three-dimensional continuums of the two TDI groups.

The findings reveal that from the stage of on-site to after-trip, tourist perception of TDI shifts from psychologically to functionally-oriented, from common to unique, and from holistic to more attribute focused. Also, it is suggested that from a postmodernism perspective, TDI is never unique, fixed or universal, but has different image perceptions and feedbacks for different tourists.

With the assistance of social sensing, a panoramic view of TDI could be established. Targeted and precision destination marketing and image promotion could be applied out to each individual tourist.

Combining with the perspectives of the tourist-destination space system and the tourism involvement theory, this research proposes a TDI transformation model and an explanation of the internal mechanism. The originality of research also lies in the methodological innovation of social sensing data and the LDA topic model.

本研究针对旅游目的地形象（TDI）及其体现出的游客空间和心理涉入, 将旅游目的地形象划分为在场形象和游后形象, 并将二者在TDI三维连续体（Three-dimensional continuums）框架下进行比较。

本研究应用内容分析法, 通过对旅游用户生成内容（tourism UGC）进行LDA（Latent Dirichlet Allocation）建模, 从非结构化的原始文本中建立起结构化的语义主题模型, 并且应用社会网络分析（Social Network Analysis）, 从定量和结构化的角度揭示了游中与游后目的地形象的差异。

研究发现, 从游中到游后, 游客的目的地形象感知经历了从心理到功能、从一般到特殊、从整体到属性的转变。同时, 基于后现代主义的视角, 旅游目的地形象并不是唯一的、固定的或放之四海而皆准的, 而是在不同的游客感知中有不同的形象和体现。

应用社会感知（Social Sensing）理论可以全面解析旅游目的地形象。同时可以针对特定游客采取精准定点的旅游目的地营销和形象推广手段。

本研究从旅游目的地空间系统和旅游涉入理论视角出发, 提出了旅游目的地形象转变的模型和其内在机制解释, 在方法上创新性地使用了社会感知数据和LDA主题模型。

关键词 旅游目的地形象, 在场形象, 游后形象, 旅游用户生成内容 (tourism UGC), LDA（Latent Dirichlet Allocation）建模, 社会感知

Para estudiar el grado de participación espacial y psicológica de los turistas reflejado en la imagen del destino turístico (TDI), el TDI se divide en grupo en el sitio y grupo posterior al viaje, y los dos grupos se comparan en el marco del continuo tridimensional.

Al modelar la posible asignación de Dirichlet (LDA) del contenido generado por el usuario turístico (UGC), se estableció un modelo de tema estructural. El tema que está separado del texto original no estructurado es el tema estructurado y la representación de TDI. El análisis de redes sociales reveló diferencias en el número y la estructura de los continuos tridimensionales de los dos grupos de TDI.

Los resultados de la encuesta muestran que, desde la escena hasta los viajes, la percepción de los turistas de TDI cambia de orientación psicológica a funcional, de lo ordinario a lo único, y de una atención general a más. Además, se sugiere que desde una perspectiva posmoderna, TDI nunca es único, fijo o universal, sino que tiene diferentes percepciones de imagen y comentarios para diferentes visitantes.

Con la ayuda de la detección social, se podría establecer una vista panorámica de TDI. El marketing de destino y la promoción de imágenes dirigidos y precisos podrían aplicarse a cada turista individual.

Combinando con las perspectivas del sistema espacial de destino turístico y la teoría de la participación turística, esta investigación propone un modelo de transformación TDI y la explicación del mecanismo interno. La originalidad de la investigación también radica en la innovación metodológica de los datos de detección social y el modelo de tema LDA.

This chapter enhances insights into destination image and competitor assessments by extending the research framework of perception-based market segmentation by two perspectives: allowing generating individual sets of competitors and contrasting two stages of travel experience: pre- and after trip. The empirical study is based on two samples of leisure travelers: a mix of international travelers who just finished their trip to Thailand and a group of European travelers interested in visiting Thailand. Against conventional assumptions though supporting more recent findings on destination decision making the majority of travelers did not identify any direct competitor.

As more destinations jump on the bandwagon of branding, their marketing organizations increasingly employ the Internet as a convenient medium for promotion. This chapter argues that instead of extending their brand communications to the Web by simply digitizing the logos, taglines, and other elements, destinations can build brands virtually in an internet-mediated environment where virtual experience takes place. The study examines how branding can be achieved through building virtualized destination image. It adopts the concepts of telepresence, virtual experience, and integrated informational response and explains how online and offline communication stimuli can affect various components of virtualized image. This expands and modifies the conventional image constructs by specifying information sources as antecedents through telepresence and integrated behavioral responses as consequences. The relationships between the image, its antecedents, and consequences, and among the image constructs are illustrated through 14 propositions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the net community in which residents and other stakeholders of communities actively participate in virtually building a strong destination brand.

The Chinese economy has grown rapidly over the past decade, making self-drive tours more affordable among Chinese tourists. Thus, self-driving tours using online tourism-related information have also been popular. This study aims to investigate information search behaviors among different segments of Chinese self-drive tourists under the influence of contemporary mobile internet technologies and compares the results with prior related studies from a global standpoint.

This paper investigates the relationships between tourist demographics and information search behavior in Mainland China based on a quantitative method. This study collected 228 surveys from users with self-drive tour experience. This study also conducted a series of online interviews to explore the potential barriers when self-drive tourists search for information.

The results showed variances within pre-decision and post-decision stages between different age groups, social classes and experience levels. Preference for up-to-date information and contemporary platforms were also observed.

Research paucity exists on self-drive tourists’ information search behavior, using data collected from Mainland Chinese tourists using mobile devices. The findings offer insights to industry practitioners, such as travel agencies and liaison websites, for refining their services to meet the information needs of Chinese self-drive tourists through more comprehensive marketing strategies.

While the importance of human touch for maintaining a tech–touch balance has been stressed, little knowledge exists regarding how such human elements should be incorporated in service settings dominated by technologies. This study aims to examine the outcomes of human touch levels across different travel stages in a hotel stay context.

Data were collected through a survey on 900 participants. Latent class analysis was first conducted to categorize the sample into groups based on human touch levels. Hypotheses were then tested using regression-based moderation analysis with the PROCESS macro for SPSS.

Human touch level negatively predicts perceived risk, which is negatively associated with satisfaction. These effects are particularly significant at check-in and check-out stages. Informational privacy significantly moderates the effect of human touch level on perceived risk. Such interaction effects were spotted at the booking and check-out stages.

This study contributes to theory by revealing the role of human touch elements in technology-driven service scenarios and provides practical guidelines for hotels on sharpening service experience by integrating human touch and technology elements.

Through integrating the service encounter framework and concept of customer touchpoints, this study takes a different approach that integrates both “tech” and “touch” by investigating the effects of customer-owned touchpoints in each core stage of a hotel stay journey.

This study aims to provide current and organised insights into past published studies on tourism destination competitiveness (TDC) in the past decade through systematic literature analysis.

A comprehensive review was performed by systematically gathering the literature published from 1983 to 2021 and coded according to categories such as author, year, article title, name of journal and TDC determinants.

The key findings of this review reveal that no universal set of items, attributes or indicators to measure the competitiveness of tourism destinations exists; the complexity and variability of many definitions and measuring elements from various perspectives portray the multi-faceted concept of competitiveness; and synergistic connection between the source of comparative and competitive advantages of TDC focusing on destination image, tourism experience and loyalty.

Research works considered in the study are only from indexed and peer-reviewed journal publications.

The study findings reveal a lack of studies that address the relationship between destination image, tourism experience and loyalty within the TDC realm. Future studies should consider complementing the tourism supply and demand side to avoid a “strategic drift” of TDC concepts, perceptions and practices.

This study examines how travel-related patterns of behavior on Facebook (FB) differ among users of different gender, age, and education. The authors assumed that females, young, and more educated people are more active in using FB for travel-related purposes and that the results will show a significant difference in their travel-related behavior patterns. Data about respondent’s travel-related behavior on FB were collected through an online survey (Google Docs) through the FB page named “The research on behaviors of FB users.” The study applies the multivariate general linear model (GLM) on the data collected from the total of 793 respondents. The results show that travel-related statuses respondents post on FB are generally about their travel destination. The main findings indicate that women, more educated, and older people are the ones who are the most active in sharing their travel-related information and are therefore target groups for promoting travel destinations via electronic word of mouth (eWOM). The study suggests target groups for promoting travel destinations via eWOM and it is the first research of this type done on a Serbian sample.

This paper examines whether guests contribute sWOM (social word of mouth) on different SNSs (social networking sites) regarding various personal motivations. SNSs have changed the way guests eat and experience their food and dishes. Marketing managers have effectively targeted SNSs as a marketing tool, yet have little research about drivers of guests' sWOM contribution on SNSs has been done. A model including the significant motives: (1) experiences, (2) opinion leadership, (3) reflection of self and (4) need for unique is tested to investigate their positive effects on contribution behavior of social media guests.

The data collected from 411 guests by using the snowball method was used for analysis. The structural equation modeling was applied to examine the relationships among the constructs and test the eight proposed hypotheses.

Results reveal that experiences, opinion leadership, reflection of self and need for unique were positively associated with contributing sWOM of restaurants. Furthermore, those who have positive experiences tend to be opinion leadership and reflection of self. And guests who show reflection of self, they are more likely to have opinion leaders and show need for uniqueness. Our study expands the existing frameworks of sWOM contribution by identifying various motivations and labeling sWOM. Findings provide restaurant managers with managerial implications for online marketing strategies on SNSs to attract sWOM contribution among guests.

It has some limitations while discovering the motivations of positive sWOM contribution. First, we only focused on the motivation of contributing positive sWOM, while negative sWOM received many arguments in changing attitudes toward buying products or services. Second, we collected data in Vietnam only without comparing with different countries. Future research could explore further cross-cultural perspectives to fill the gap. Third, this study explored sWOM contribution in service environment, sWOM contribution from service context may be slightly different from those of product brands.

These findings highlight the motivations of sWOM contribution that restaurant managers must recognize and make use of it. SNSs have given power to consumers to post everything at anytime and anywhere they like, therefore restaurant managers need to deeply understand why their consumers contribute sWOM. In digital era, customers and guests have become the ultimate tools for promoting product or service brands. The marketing managers should create an online platform in order to facilitate their consumers to discuss their brand frequently (Charu et al., 2018). Restaurants should have policies to push positive eWOM maximally and also reduce advertising costs.

This is one of the first studies on sWOM contribution of what motivate guests to contribute their sWOM on SNSs. Theoretically, this study offers deep insights into the links between various motivations and sWOM in foodservice context. Managerially, understanding these motivations allow marketing managers create effective policies that motivate guests to contribute positive word of mouth.

Tourism is a highly informative industry, thus the developments in technology and customer behavior that influence the level and availability of travel information are essential to understand (Indian Institute of Tourism & Travel Management, 2017). “Both on the demand side and on the supply side of tourism, blogging plays a major role, enabling tourists to communicate, track and respond on their opinions and service assessments directly with the visitors through multiple Internet platforms” (Kiráľová & Pavlíčeka, 2015). Through use of Internet as well as other information and communications technologies has paved the way for modern in the tourism industry. The significance of Blogs in the tourism market is huge. Ever more investigators are exploring the impact of blogging on tourism. The Blogging is going to be a major means of contact distributed throughout the country such as wildfires. The tourism industry has benefited most from the Internet, making blogging a crucial component of the marketing and preparation of the tourism industry (Sahoo & Mukunda, 2017). This section explores travel blogs as an expression of travel experience. Traveler views on prominent travel blog pages have been evaluated to obtain a sense of the experience expressed at the destination. Advancements technologies and a growing number of travel blogs make it easier for travel blog monitors to evaluate their service quality as a cost-effective method, and enhance the experience of the traveler (Pan, MacLaurin, & Crotts, 2007).

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it highlights the emergence of Generation Z and the interface of its members with the tourism system. Second, by way of a theoretical model, the paper provides a more holistic approach to understanding Generation Z travel experiences in which the emphasis is shifted from the destination to the traveller. This is in keeping with the trend which lays more emphasis on people rather than landscape.

This is qualitative research founded on an interpretive (constructivist) paradigm. Selecting Generation Z as the subject locates this study under generational theory and assumes prima facie a socially constructed reality. The paper is based on research conducted in New Zealand aimed at understanding the travel experiences of inbound Generation Z travellers. Data were collected from 12 semi-structured interviews lasting about 30 min each and from 5 blogs. Nvivo 11 programme was used in analysing data and developing themes. Core categories and related themes were generated forming building blocks of a theoretical model.

Findings revealed interplay of multiple factors in Generation Z’s travel experiences at a destination. The factors are global in nature, destination centric and those which are immediate or proximate to the individual. To fully grasp the notion of experience requires the gestalt of the three as well as pre-trip, during-trip and post-trip factors.

The impact of significant events upon participants is assumed. A specific analysis of the events and the magnitude of their influence on the individual participants may be necessary.

Destination marketers tend to concentrate on psychological aspects to appeal to the traveller. The focus, in this case, is creating an attractive image in the mind of travellers to get them to come to the destination. This research suggests shifting the focus to understanding the evolving traveller.

Governments and tourism purveyors may require an ever-increasing budget to map out strategies to meet the continuously morphing needs of the future traveller. The constantly evolving global environment necessitates greater flexibility in institutional framework with less bureaucratic bottlenecks.

Generation Z is a relatively new entrant into the tourism market which makes this research relevant and timely. The paucity of academic literature on a generation which is contemporaneously in its “highly influenceable” period of life and entering adulthood in an increasingly changing world is further credence for this research. A more holistic theoretical model to understanding Generation Z travel experience is proposed.