Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 11.1 Stages of tourist brand experience and the Internet.
communications from French tourism and travel companies, at the destination and service
provider level. The Internet introduces a whole range of other tourist experiences and comments,
images, video, and communities which will also infl uence this pre-consumption experience, and
which will infl uence where this consumption experience happens. UGC and content sharing
websites are very infl uential at this stage. The evolution of technology in wireless technologies
and smart phones allows the tourist to upload images, text, video and audio to the Internet,
to sites such as YouTube and Virtual Tourist (Buhalis and Law 2008; Munar 2009). These
communications can be compelling as they are from other consumers and not the tourism fi rm
(Buhalis and Law 2008).
DMOs and tourism fi rms can infl uence this process by encouraging travellers to post videos
and images of their trips, perhaps through competitions or other incentives. Online tourist
networks and communities provide probably the most infl uential Internet generated phenomena
on tourism brand experience. This is because of the considerable infl uence that online consumer
review has on tourist decision making (Papathassis and Knolle 2011; Sparks and Browning 2011).
Negative reviews can be magnifi ed in impact on the tourist evaluations of the tourist service
(Sparks and Browning 2011). TripAdvisor has emerged as a dominant online community where
consumers can share travel experiences. It has been established that for hotels benefi ting from
TripAdvisor reviews, that these reviews were prominent in online searches of the hotel name
(Cunningham et al . 2010).
The fi rm website is the shop window for the tourism services provider, and acts as an
important source of practical information on the tourism offering. Importantly, it has the power
to produce a positive or negative infl uence on the brand experience. Search engine optimization
(SEO) presents the tourism fi rm with the opportunity to promote its ranking in enquiries on
search engines, which is critical in exposing the tourism offering to the tourist. Tourists are not
just consuming a tourism offering such as accommodation, dining or activity. They are also
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