Tourism and online photography

This paper documents the use of online travel photo-sharing technologies among Hong Kong residents. The advent of Web 2.0 is changing fundamentally the tourist information search and destination choice process. Yet, to date, no study has documented Web 2.0 usage levels and preferences for certain media for posting travel photographs across an entire community. This study reveals that some 89% of pleasure travelers take photographs and that 41% of them posted their photographs online. Social network sites (SNSs), instant messaging, online photo albums and personal blogs were the most popular media used. In general, people who post photographs online tend to be younger, better educated, and earn a higher income than those who do not. The study determined that most people also use multiple media platforms to disseminate their images. Cluster analysis based on the four major styles of online platform identified five cohorts of users who differed in number and type of media used, demographic profile and travel motive. Implications for destination promotion are discussed.     

“If I was going to die I should at least be having fun”: Travel blogs,meaning and tourist experience

Travel blogs are an under-utilised resource for researchers of tourism experiences. They can provide rich insights on how tourists express the transformational effects of their experiences for the self. This study of travel blogs by nineteen British bloggers reveals how elements of the narrative relating to self-reflection and emotions are central to the process of transforming their travel experiences into personally meaningful experiences. Bloggers implicitly and explicitly express how travel contributes to self-identity, signalling self-development. The study contributes to knowledge about the lasting impact of long term travel on people, adding meaning symbolic of an evolving self.     

A content analysis of travel agency web‐sites in Korea

The Internet has become a dominant issue in today's tourism environment. This paper is to provide large travel agencies in Korea with a better understanding of their Web‐based competitive environment. A content analysis of the top 60 travel agencies Web‐sites in Korea suggests that many travel agencies do not develop their own Web‐sites and although travel agencies are using the Web, they have not, as yet, fully utilized capabilities of Web‐sites. This study also suggests some implications for successful cyber tourism marketing, including the establishment of a Web‐site, on‐line selling, customer supports, and cyber marketing mix strategy on the Web. Limitations and further research issues are also suggested.     

The perceived usefulness of blog postings: An extension of the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm

Today millions of consumers connect with one another on travel blogs as both contributors and users. Contributors share detailed narratives of their recent experience with specific hotels/resorts leading to recommendations, while users acquire information from them to base their purchase decisions on. Hotel managers carefully monitor what previous guests say in the evaluations assuming that negative evaluations will deter future customers. Framed in the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm, this study focused on clarifying the impact consumers who post on travel blogs have on blog users by analyzing user reactions to 134 travel matched blog recommendations. Findings demonstrate that as expected a higher percentage of blog users find multiple evaluations that are congruent with one another (both negative and positive) helpful, and that negative postings were not necessarily bad if followed by a positive counter reaction. Furthermore, the paper addresses the issue of deception attempting to determine if it exists and what effect it has on the web 2.0 medium. Implications for managers and researchers are discussed.     

Social Media as a New Play in a Marketing Channel Strategy: Evidence from Taiwan Travel Agencies' Blogs

With social media playing an increasingly important role in marketing strategies for travel agencies, this study explores travel agencies that develop their own travel blogs as a marketing channel in order to differentiate their products or services and their strategic performances. The paper herein adopts a two-stage research design, with the first stage developing a three-round Delphi research. According to this research, Taiwanese travel agencies consider four external environment forces, five internal motivations for investment, four developing differentiated strategies, and four channel performance measurement indicators for managing travel agencies' own blogs as a marketing channel. The second stage explores a quantitative survey, Structural Equation Modeling, with the structural equation testing the business model of a travel blog marketing channel strategy. Finally, the findings provide innovative approaches for effectively exploiting differentiated marketing channel strategies when targeting maximum profits.     

The Perceived Destination Image of Hong Kong as Revealed in the Travel Blogs of Mainland Chinese Tourists

This study investigated travel blogs as a manifestation of the travel experience, along with the destination image of Hong Kong from the perspective of tourists from mainland China. Recently published blog entries were selected and analyzed using content analysis. Empirical results indicated that the overall perceived destination image of Hong Kong was positive, with particular strengths in transportation, the harbor, and outlying islands. The major weaknesses of Hong Kong as a travel destination were the price of meals outside hotels, rooms in five-star hotels, and the quality of cosmetics and skincare products. This article has implications for policymakers and practitioners with regard to making use of travel blogs to gather authentic visitor comments on Hong Kong.     

China in the Eyes of Western Travelers as Represented in Travel Blogs

Travel blogs provide a new way of understanding consumers' perceptions on destination and its associated products. The purpose of this study was to examine international tourists' destination image of China as represented in travel blog discourse. Data were obtained from blog entries relating to trips to China posted on three dominant travel blog websites. Content analysis facilitated by Atlas.ti 6.0 was performed on a total of 89 China-related travel blogs. The study identified the most frequently discussed aspects of tourists' experiences in China. The results also indicated that the blog authors had mixed and paradoxical images of China as identified by previous research. Marketing implications for China's tourism development based on the results were discussed.     

A strategic website evaluation of online travel agencies

Online travel Web sites have been the most frequently visited online information facilities by travelers. To evaluate the effectiveness of a travel Web site, the Web site manager should regularly check whether or not it is fulfilling the objectives that were established for it. This research uses a strategic Web site evaluation framework to introduce a five-stage process for examining the consistency of Web site’s presence and its intended strategies. Two leading online travel agencies with different business strategies are selected to demonstrate methods of implementing a strategic evaluation framework and to compare the evaluation results. A hierarchical evaluation structure is introduced to explicitly delineate the two Web sites’ different strategy intentions and related evaluation criteria. Results show that an individual Web site’s strategy-inconsistent criteria can be easily identified through a gap analysis and criteria performance matrix. A strategy-inconsistent dimension can be discovered through a radar chart analysis of the 4PsC (Product, Promotion, Price, Place, and Customer Relationship) dimensions and a transaction phases analysis.     

Sustainable travel writing? Exploring the ethical dilemmas of twenty-first-century travel writers

There is a paucity of academic literature on travel writing that examines travel writers and their perceived influence on sustainability. This article addresses this lacuna by exploring how travel writers understand their responsibilities and reflects on ethics in their profession, particularly in how foreign destinations and cultures are portrayed. This is significant because some travel writers have been accused of contributing to what interviewees called the “Lonely Planet Syndrome”, the notion that writing about a place will introduce and encourage mass tourism, changing the original state of the place for the worse. In this qualitative, phenomenological study, data were collected from 23 in-depth interviews with twenty-first-century travel writers and analysed using an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Findings suggest that while some interviewees expressed anxiety about their perceived accountability to mediate foreign cultures responsibly, others embraced their role as a cultural mediator. They cared about local cultures and wanted to write in responsible ways by supporting more sustainable outcomes, reflected in the themes of cross-cultural understanding, socio-cultural and environmental advocacy and promoting benefits of tourism to communities. Future studies could include exploring the role of travel editors, travel writers’ professional knowledge and the growing role of travel blogs.     

Storytelling approach of the self-reported slow adventure to Tibet: Constructing experience and identity

Most of our travel experiences are stored, recorded, and relived in the form of stories; tourist blogs have emerged as a modern form of travel story. These stories provide information about exciting moments and memorable events, which are usually emotional highpoints that can be useful for tourism marketers. Based on the sociological concept of storytelling, this study investigates which aspects of the slow adventure experience travelers present in their travel blogs through a rubric elaborated on extant literature. The findings reveal three types of slow adventure stories, and each type of story relates to a different identity construction. The article concludes with a discussion of its theoretical contributions in terms of adding to the literature of adventure tourism and storytelling. In revealing the themes and identities relating to specific slow adventure experiences, it provides potential practical implications of travel blogs for slow adventure product designers and marketers.     

近十年国外旅游推荐系统的应用研究

利用网络进行在线信息搜索已成为旅游者在旅游前获取信息的主要渠道,然而随着互联网的普及发展以及电子商务网站的兴起,旅游者常常被淹没于大量的信息搜索和产品选择当中,而旅游推荐系统则是解决信息超载问题的有效方法。文章通过国外近十年的相关文献的收集整理,对旅游推荐系统的概念、应用及发展现状进行了分析,并重点对旅游推荐系统中的关键技术运用等进行了综述,指出旅游推荐系统应用的复杂性与特殊性,以及在旅游推荐系统中单纯利用基于协同过滤或基于内容过滤的技术的限制性而更多地采用基于知识的及混合的方法;探讨了旅游决策理论在推荐系统中的作用与应用;最后提出了旅游推荐系统的一般模型及未来研究热点,以期对国内旅游推荐系统的研究与应用有所借鉴。     

旅游2.0:构建新的旅游服务模式

本文通过对Web 2.0在国内外旅游类网站上的应用的调研和文献研究,来介绍Web 2.0如何在旅游行业中的应用.通过对目前Web 2.0中的技术如博客、播客、维基(Wiki)、RSS等在旅游网站中的应用来说明旅游类网站在Web 2.0中的可发展性.     

Relationships of Perceived Justice to Service Recovery,Service Failure Attributions,Recovery Satisfaction,and Loyalty in the Context of Airline Travelers

In recent years, hospitality and tourism researchers have presented their findings of many studies on website performance and evaluations. Although these prior studies have achieved a certain degree of success for assisting industrial practitioners to develop and maintain their websites, it remains largely unknown how consumers find a specific travel or hotel website. This paper reports a study that investigated the perceived importance of different channels for finding travel or hotel websites from an international travelers' perspective. Empirical results from 153 travel or hotel website users indicated that the Google search engine was the only channel that was perceived as important, and 47.4% of the respondents viewed up to three screens in the list of search results when using search engines. The paper should be of interest to industrial practitioners and academic researchers to understand better the behavior of users of travel and hotel websites during their website search procedure.     

Motivation for family vacations with young children: anecdotes from the Internet

Family travel receives growing attention from both the travel industry and academia, but they ignore a vital segment of the family holiday: nuclear families that travel with young children. This study investigated the motivations that drive this market segment to take vacations as a starting point to understand the travel behavior of family tourists, especially those with young and dependent children. By employing netnography, this study collected and analyzed 97 travel diaries from five travel blogs and one travel forum in 2015. Five motivation themes emerged, namely they are spending quality time with children, creating pleasant memories, learning and development, compensation for children, and self-compensation. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed and future research is suggested.     

家庭生命周期与旅游态度的关联研究——以长沙市居民为例

家庭是旅游态度形成的最重要环境背景,也一直是旅游活动的重要组织单元,探究家庭生命周期与旅游态度的关系意义重大.文章依据已有研究成果,建立家庭生命周期模型,制定旅游态度量表,以问卷工具面向长沙市居民进行调查,获得基础数据,运用因子分析得到了追求享受、强调卫生、看重设施、向往体验、关注身心健康等5个方面的旅游态度主成分,通过验证性因子分析后,再用相关分析、多元回归分析探究家庭生命周期与旅游态度5个主成分的关系.结果表明,随着家庭生命周期的演进,人们愈发追求享受、看重设施、关注身心健康.无巢期人群看重设施和关注身心健康的表现低于其他阶段人群,空巢期人群追求享受的表现高于其他阶段人群,空巢期、鳏寡期人群关注身心健康的表现高于其他阶段人群,满巢期人群向往体验的表现高于其他阶段人群.     

Conflicting Viewpoints on Web Design

SUMMARY

While design undoubtedly affects a Website's success, two ideologically opposite schools of thought have developed as to what is meant by good design. The approaches differ fundamentally in terms of how to balance two interrelated but conflicting elements-presentation and usability. Supporters of the aesthetic school argue that the graphical/multimedia features of the Web should be used to enhance the visitor experience. Functionalists, on the other hand, argue for less emphasis on visual design and more focus on content. This article reviews both approaches and examines their applicability to the travel product.     

Users and Non-users of Smartphones for Travel: Differences in Factors Influencing the Adoption Decision

This study aims to understand individuals' decision processes to adopt smartphone for travel and, thereafter, to explore differences in the factors influencing users and non-users. Based on the innovation-decision process model by Rogers [2003. Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press], smartphone users are classified into user and non-user groups depending upon their use of smartphones for travel purposes. In order to empirically examine the group differences, a survey was conducted for college students in November 2011 (n?=?350). The results of this study reveal that smartphone users for travel are higher in their level of innovativeness than non-users. Significant discrepancies in the use of smartphone functions also existed; albeit no difference in general smartphone-use habit including length of smartphone use and daily use. In terms of perceived innovative characteristics of smartphone use for travel, users are more positive in usefulness, compatibility, result demonstrability, and visibility. A predictive model of smartphone use for travel suggests that personal innovativeness, smartphone functions being used, and perception on result demonstrability could improve the predictability of the adoption behavior of smartphone for traveling. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Using Twitter Data for Cruise Tourism Marketing and Research

The need to understand how social media affect the hospitality and tourism field has increased. This paper discusses and demonstrates social media analytics using Twitter data referring to cruise travel. This research also includes an in-depth analysis of tweets by three types of user groups: commercial, news/blogs, and private. The results show that not only were words related to travel, destination, industry, and emotion most frequently used in composing tweets, but celebrities, professional bloggers, cruise lines, and travel agencies actually led major subgroups on cruise topics on Twitter. Based on such findings, this study provides feasible marketing strategies.     

Targeting Rural Tourists in the Internet: Comparing Travel Motivation and Activity-Based Segments

This study aims to compare activity-based segmentation and travel motivation segmentation from the perspective of information search behavior and online use behavior by comparing segment heterogeneity. The data were collected from users of three Finnish rural tourism websites with 1754 completed and usable questionnaires to create segmentation solutions based on travel activities and motivations using hierarchical cluster analysis and then comparing the results. The results indicate that travel activities are more useful than travel motivations in finding heterogeneous segmentation solutions, making the travel activity segments more heterogeneous than travel motivation segments as regards their information search behavior and Internet use. The results suggest that in this era of Internet marketing, travel activities are a better segmentation base than travel motivations in order to target different market segments as activities form more heterogeneous segmentation solutions.     

Travel Agents and Their Survival Thomas

Abstract

The travel agency industry depends upon commissions for a majority of its revenue. When these commissions decrease or stop the industry must change the means in which revenue is made. The Internet has caused a significant reduction in airline ticket sales and therefore has caused travel agencies to change. In addition travel agencies have reduced commissions paid to airlines thus causing more changes. There were four categories of travel agencies discussed in the article along with their adaptation styles. These types include (1) the independent operator of a small travel agency with very limited resources (2) the normal agency with 2 or 3 agents which does a substantial business (3) the larger agency that is high-tech and high touch and depends on automation and the Web to some extent (innovators) (4) agencies that are Web based with very little automation otherwise and who were technologically adaptable and saw opportunity in the Web. The study examines how agencies have adapted and prospered through this transitional period.