Advances in Social Media for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality

New Perspectives, Practice and Cases

Marianna Sigala, Ulrike Gretzel, Marianna Sigala, Ulrike Gretzel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317185130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry

This book brings together cutting edge research and applications of social media and related technologies, their uses by consumers and businesses in travel, tourism and hospitality.

The first section addresses topical issues related to how social media influence the operations and strategies of tourism firms and help them enhance tourism experiences: open innovation, crowdsourcing, service-dominant logic, value co-creation, value co-destruction and augmented reality. The second section of the book looks at new applications of social media for marketing purposes in a variety of tourism-related sectors, addressing crowd-sourced campaigns, customer engagement and influencer marketing. The third section uses case studies and new methodologies to analyze travel review posting and consumption behaviors as well as the impact of social media on traveller perceptions and attitudes, with a focus on collaborative consumption and sharing economy accommodation. Finally, the fourth section focuses on hot topics and issues related to the analysis, interpretation and use of online information and user-generated content for deriving business intelligence and enhancing business decision-making.

Written by an international body of well-known researchers, this book uses fresh theoretical lenses, perspectives and methodological approaches to look at the practical implications of social media for tourism suppliers, destinations, tourism policy makers and researchers alike. For these reasons, it will be a valuable resource for students, managers and academics with an interest in information and communication technologies, marketing for tourism and hospitality, and travel and transportation management.

Part 1
Social media applications for co-creating customer value and experience

Marianna Sigala

The bright and the dark side of social media in co-creating tourism experiences

Social media advances empower tourists by changing: the way they access, share, distribute, discuss and create information; with whom, how and when they interact; and how and when they participate in business operations (Sigala, 2017a). Customer experience is defined (Gentile et al., 2007, p. 398) as

“a set of interactions between a customer and a product, a company, or part of its organization, which provoke a reaction. This experience is strictly personal and implies the customer’s involvement at different levels (rational, emotional, sensorial, physical and spiritual)”.

As experiences are formed, shaped and co-created through interactions and participation, the use of social media for interacting, sharing and discussing information amongst a plethora of actors (i.e. tourists, virtual communities, firms, social networks) influence experience co-creation on an unprecedented scale and scope. The literature has mainly identified the following ways in which social media influence and form tourism experiences:

• Generation and use of big data for personalizing experiences
• Customer empowerment for participating in experience customization
• Mushrooming of the digital touchpoints whereby tourists can interact with firms, travellers, communities and other actors for shaping their experiences. Social media empower all actors to own and operate a touchpoint. Thus, touchpoints can be categorized as: brand-owned (firms’ pages on social media, mobile applications); partner-owned (e.g. distribution partners’ channels, marketing agents’ channels); customer-owned (e.g. customers’ blogs and social media profiles); and social/external (e.g. online communities). This plethora but also diversity of touchpoints implies that firms cannot any more control and influence customers’ experience alone, and that travellers’ experiences are shaped by numerous factors external to the firm and the customers’ resources.
• Influence of customer experience at all stages of the customer journey; in fact, the use of social media shifts and changes tourists’ behavior during various trip stages. For example, by using social media, many tourists: plan their trips while at the destination and last minute rather than during the pre-trip stage; share their tourism experiences and spread word of mouth while consuming the tourism experience and not after their trip; the tourism experience is not mainly influenced by factors and actors existing at the time and location of the experience but also by actors located at other places but interacting through social media as well as by information generated and stored in social media well in advance of the real tourism experience. In other words, there is increased evidence that social media amplify and support an interplay and spillover effects of tourism experiences and expectations across all the stages of the customer journey, while the boundaries of behaviors and practices of tourists at each stage are getting blurred.
• The multimedia content generated and shared through social media (e.g. videos, customer reviews, photographs, travel suggestions, maps) influence all the dimensions of tourism experiences namely, emotional, cognitive, sensorial, physical and spiritual. Tourists have access to and generate a plethora of tourism information that significantly influences the way they feel, what they know, what they do and what they think about tourism destinations and offerings.

Sigala (2017a) summarized the ways in which social media facilitate the transformation, but also the formation and creation of new types of tourism experiences as follows:

• Social media-assisted and facilitated tourism experiences (when tourists share travel resources for assisting others’ travel planning processes)
• Social media-enriched and augmented tourism experiences (when online travel resources enable tourists to make experiences more personalized, meaningful, imaginative and emotional)
• Social media-formed tourism experiences (when social media interactions amongst various actors enable an iterative co-construction process of experience meaning, understanding and evaluation)
• Social media-mediated tourism experiences (the virtual experience of a destination)
• Social media as the tourism experience itself (the use of the social media while travelling is the core and major purpose of having a tourism experience, i.e. the social media become a tourism experience)
• Social media-empowered tourism experiences (when customers are empowered to participate and engage in the value co-creation processes of the firm, i.e. the customer is embedded within the firm’s value system)
• Social media-enabled tourism experiences (i.e. the use of social media for creating new types of tourism experiences, e.g. when the customer uses the social media for becoming a tourism entrepreneur providing tourism experiences, e.g. sharing economy, the customer uses the firm’s infrastructure and value system for providing – marketing tourism experiences)

However, although research has already recognized and described the types of tourism experiences co-created and influenced by social media, little is known on why and how social media form and shape tourism experiences. Service-Dominant-Logic (SDL) and value co-creation are increasingly being used as theoretical lenses for developing a better understanding of the processes influencing the co-creation of tourism experiences (Campos et al., 2015), but there is still limited knowledge on how these perspectives are applied and function in a social media and digital ecosystem (Neuhofer et al., 2012). The few existing studies on social media tourism experiences are also limited in investigating co-creation from a single actor/tourist approach. On the contrary, based on the principles of the SDL, there is an increased need to start examining value co-creation in social media through a subjective, interactive and dialectic approach amongst multiple actors exchanging resources within an ecosystem rather than a dyadic relationship level (Vargo & Lusch, 2015; Sigala, 2017b). The phenomenological and subjective nature of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) also implies that value co-creation practices may mean value creation for one actor but value co-destruction for another actor. Thus, actors’ interactions do not always lead to positive outcomes for all actors. Value co-destruction (VCD) (Plé & Chumpitaz-Caceres, 2010) has emerged as an important way to conceptualize the non-positive outcomes from actor-to-actor interactions. However, most of the studies have focused on examining the positive aspects of value co-creation practices, ignoring the hidden and dark sides of actors’ participation in co-creation, which may also diminish and/or destroy value.

Overview of part 1

The first part of the book includes five chapters aiming to provide both a theoretical underpinning and practical evidence on how the use of social media influence and shape the co-creation of tourism experiences. The first two chapters illuminate the bright and the dark side of the role of social media in forming tourism experiences by discussing the theoretical foundations of both value co-creation and co-destruction. The third chapter illuminates on tourists’ innovation capability to use social media for enriching and augmenting their tourism experiences. The last two chapters provide practical examples and a case study showing how social media and their enhancement with augmented reality enrich tourism experiences.

Analytically, the first chapter – written by Barbara Neuhofer and Dimitrios Buhalis and titled as “Service-dominant logic in the social media landscape: new perspectives on experience and value co-creation” discusses the SDL as a new perspective for experience and value co-creation in a social media-enabled tourism context. To achieve that, the chapter discusses and contextualizes the key assumptions of the SDL in the context of social media by discussing case studies showing how the former can be applied for value co-creation practices and experience formation in tourism.

In chapter 2 titled “Value co-destruction in service ecosystems: findings from TripAdvisor”, Marianna Sigala discusses the dark side of customer review web-sites in destroying value in a tourism setting. The chapter provides a critical review of existing research in VCD and uses TripAdvisor as an ecosystem for collecting data about the forms, conceptualizations and antecedents of value co-destruction from a multi-actor perspective. The findings revealed that value co-destruction can stem from all TripAdvisor ecosystem actors, i.e. “known” and “unknown” actors such as travellers, marketing agencies, tourism firms, anonymous actors with fake profiles) by uploading fake and/or inaccurate reviews. Findings also confirmed the phenomenological and socially constructed conceptualization of VCD, i.e. the practice adopted by marketing agencies being paid to write positive reviews for hotels creates value for themselves, the hotels (positive reviews enable hotels to charge higher price and receive more bookings), and TripAdvisor (a greater number of reviews provides more “content” for potential travels), but it destroys value for travellers (biased and inaccurate information).

In the third chapter titled “Tourist-driven innovations in social media: an opportunity for tourism organizations”, Astrid Dickinger and Lidija Lalicic elaborate on how social media enable and support tourism-driven innovation, a concept not adequately addressed in the tourism literature (Sigala, 2012). Social media advances do not only increase the numbers of touchpoints, actors and the network of the tourist experience, but they also create a high level of consumer independence, power and creativity to manage these touchpoints. In this vein, this chapter uses several examples to demonstrate how tourists managing their own touch-points lead to a shift from co-creation to user-driven creation. To achieve this, the chapter structures and exemplifie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Lists of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Social media applications for co-creating customer value and experience
• PART 2 Marketing using social media applications and concepts
• PART 3 Social media: travellers’ behavior
• PART 4 Social media, knowledge management, market research, business intelligence, social media analytics
• Conclusion
• Index