Travel Reference
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medium, while 98 of Ad Age Top 100 advertisers have had campaigns on YouTube (YouTube
2012). The brand community plays a critical role in providing a social context for understanding
development of brand meaning (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001; McAlexander, Schouten and Koenig
2002). The brand community is not limited by the physical realm; apart from the social brand
community, which involves consumers interacting face to face or within virtual worlds, there
may also be a psychological sense of brand community, which does not involve any social
interaction but where consumers have a perceived connection to other users of the brand
(Carlson, Sutter, and Brown 2008). The communal interaction within the brand community
can have a signifi cant impact on how the individual's personalized brand meaning is created
(Patterson and O'Malley 2006). Within the tourism industry, travellers can exchange experiences,
information and recommendations in the online communities (Buhalis and Law 2008; Sanchez-
Franco and Rondan-Cataluna 2010), which are more likely to be trusted by tourists than
corporate communications (Buhalis and Law 2008). Tourism communities include virtualtourist.
com and tripadvisor.com . TripAdvisor provides an opportunity for guests to post reviews of tourism
services providers such as hotels, and is very infl uential as a fi rst point of contact for travellers.
Tourism can be perceived to be high involvement and high risk, exacerbated by the absence of
the personal touch of the travel agent, and online reviews address these issues (Papathanassis and
Knolle 2011). While negative reviews can be traumatic for the tourism fi rm, there is evidence
that improvements in service quality can be linked to TripAdvisor (Cunningham, Smyth, Wu and
Greene 2010).
The tourism fi rm website is the electronic shop window, and by the use of virtual tours can
provide a more meaningful taste of the experience awaiting the tourist. The corporate site needs
to be engaging and yet informative. Many tourism fi rms now have booking engines embedded
in their websites. Tourism fi rms can obtain valuable information about visitors to their website
by tracking their identity and their activity on the site, and also develop potential customer data-
bases by inviting enquiries and registration (Buhalis 2011). At the destination level, online brand
communication and promotions are critical. DMOs are the public or private agencies responsible for
management and marketing of branded destinations, and the tourism stakeholders, enterprises,
local authorities etc., e.g. England Tourist Board, Destination Bristol. DMOs have become alert
to the opportunities for more effective marketing presented by the Internet. This can be done
through various means such as driving traffi c by linking to suitable sites, sending virtual cards
to visitors to the destination with a link to the site, and also importantly, facilitating visitors to
make online bookings for accommodation or other services, or at least to link to these suppliers
(Raventos 2006).
Intermediary websites such as Expedia, Travelocity, Venere, Hotels.com, Booking.com are
highly visible portal sites which have become mainstream in a relatively short time period
(Buhalis 2011) and are likely to be among the fi rst sites the consumer will see on a search engine
when seeking accommodation or other tourist services. Indeed, 'mega travel e-mediaries . . .
established as internet brands' have become dominant in tourism ecommerce at the expense of
DMOs (Hyun and Cai 2009: 38). These intermediaries provide a useful service to the consumer
in aggregating details and facilitating the user in identifying accommodation that meets the time,
location, benefi ts and price requested. Many of these sites also incorporate user reviews, and are
forcing tourism fi rms to re-evaluate their value chains (Buhalis and Law 2008).
Social networking sites facilitate users in creating an online profi le, to invite friends to their
page, to share all types of content including text, images, audio, blogs (Kaplan and Haenlin 2010).
Facebook is the dominant social network, with 845 million active subscribers at the end of 2011,
80 per cent of whom are outside North America (Facebook 2012). Virtual reality is the 'use of a
computer-generated 3D environment - called a “virtual environment” - that one can navigate
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