Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
podcasts, have encouraged individuals to generate content and share their experiences online at
home or through mobile devices while being on the move and in turn co-create their experiences
more than ever before (Ramaswamy 2009).
Due to the proliferation of the Internet, constant connectivity of mobile technologies, and
engaging nature of social media tools, co-creation experiences between individuals are
maximized. In fact, there is evidence that interactions between individuals have 'exploded on an
unprecedented scale everywhere in the value creation system' (Ramaswamy 2009: 17).
This means that through ICTs, co-creation is no longer only occurring between companies
and consumers (B2C) but increasingly among other consumers and the social network which
enforces consumer-to-consumer (C2C) co-creation on all levels. As a result, with new forms of
social technologies continuing to emerge over the next years, experience co-creation is expected
to fl ourish even more. It will become crucial that tourism marketers exploit the tools of the Web
2.0 to allow for more meaningful interrelations with tourists and among tourists by building
platforms and spaces to interact, comment and share experiences.
Stages: multiple stages of the travel process
By integrating ICTs, co-creation experiences are taken to a whole new level in terms of tempo-
ral and geographical dimensions of when/where experiences can be created. ICTs surround the
tourist anywhere, at any time in any travel stage. This leads to unprecedented opportunities to
co-create experiences everywhere along the value creation system, i.e. the whole customer
journey. The tourism experience has been recognized as a multi-phase phenomenon in the past
(Clawson and Knetch 1966; Craig-Smith and French 1994). However, ICTs enforce these
dimensions by facilitating experience creation long before the actual service encounter, on-site
and after the tourist's return to his/her home environment (Fotis
et al
. 2011; Huang
et al
. 2010;
Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier 2009). Thereby, ICTs are adopted for information search, compari-
son, decision making, travel planning, booking, communication, and sharing of experiences.
Depending on the specifi c task, a wide range of tools is used to facilitate and enhance the experi-
ence (Buhalis and Law 2008; Gretzel
et al
. 2006), including the Internet, virtual communities
or Second Life (Binkhorst and Den Dekker 2009), social networking platforms, blogs or micro-
blogging, such as Twitter (Wang and Fesenmaier 2004), virtual worlds or social networking
sites (Shaw
et al
. 2011), Facebook, YouTube or Wikipedia (Ramaswamy 2009). Businesses
across all sectors of the travel and tourism industry therefore need to capture their own peculiari-
ties and resources and assess where they can best implement technology to facilitate experience
co-creation, not only on-site but in all stages of the travel.
Pre
-
Travel Stage: Getting inspired, planning, decision
-
making, booking.
With the emergence of the
Internet, social media and virtual worlds, tourists are now empowered to experience tourism
destinations before the physical travel. By using ICTs, the pre-travel phase has a high potential
for enhancing co-creation distinctively. Tourists start dreaming, seek for inspiration and
information and look for opinions and advice from others (Xiang 2011). The range of social
media tools available, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TripAdvisor and more recently
Pinterest, assist tourists to experience potential hotels, destinations and attractions prior to
travelling. In these online environments, some destinations, such as Sweden, Thailand and Puerto
Rico have already successfully demonstrated co-creation by encouraging users to upload and
share images, stories and videos with the travel community (Buhalis and Wagner 2013). This
underlines the importance to not only provide tourist consumers with information, but
actively connect and engage to enhance their pre-holiday experience by co-creating with them
in the available spaces online (Huang
et al
. 2010). Moreover, virtual realities, such as Second
