Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
38
Virtual communities
Online blogs as a marketing tool
Carmela Bosangit
Introduction
The Internet has affected the travel and tourism industry in various ways such as marketing,
distribution channel and information search for tourism products and services, to name a few.
With developments in web technology particularly that of virtual communities, blogs, e-review
sites and photo sharing websites, the industry is again challenged to cope with the changes they
bring into tourism consumption as well as the delivery of tourism products. According to
Stepchenkova, Mills and Jiang (2007), virtual communities revolutionised the way people
socialize, exchange information, access resources and perform transactions. Inevitably, these
communities have also penetrated tourist's and travellers' practices. Virtual travel communities
have empowered tourists in many ways but not limited to:
1
building a community of consumers with shared goals and interests;
2
connecting with other travellers;
3
exchanging of information;
4
holistic evaluation of their travel experiences; and
5
more convenient communication tool.
These developments further enhance the tourist experiences and tourist practices and hence
require the attention of the industry as it presents them with opportunities to reach their
customers as well as gain deeper understanding of their behaviour which can offer insights to
their services and destinations. These web applications are helping more and more users in all the
three phases of the tourism consumption process (pre-consumption, consumption and post-
consumption) suggesting places to go, proposing hotel reviews and so on (Cantoni, Tardinin,
Inversini and Marchiori 2009: 16).
Blogging is an innovation in personal publishing and has become a new form of social inter-
action on the web, massively distributed but completely connected conversation on every
imaginable topic of interest (Marlow 2004). The phenomenal growth of blogging has turned
it into a key part of online culture (Hsu and Lin 2008). Blogs, also referred to as consumer- or
user generated content, create a vast pool of unbiased information generated by consumers