Virtual communities - Tourism Marketing - page 527

Table 38.2 Focus of research and possible insights to theories and marketing practices

Focus of research Possible insights to marketing

Travel blogs
(text, photos, videos and links )

Travel experiences as narrated (types of experiences, emotional
responses, thoughts and reflections)
Perceived and represented destination images

Travel bloggers
(the tourists/travellers)

Bloggers segmentation (opinion leaders vs. lurkers)
Travel blogging as tourist practice and part of tourist experience
(motivation)

Travel blog website
(virtual travel communities)

Possible distribution channel or advertising platform
Travel bloggers as a community of consumers
Uses of virtual travel communities

Blog readers (other blog
members, family and friends
and the general public)

Effectiveness as a word-of-mouth communication
Influence to purchase decision making

and risks, learning and refl ections, novelty and differences, self-expansion and escape to their
audiences. The presentation of self and development of self was observed as an underlying theme
of these stories. It is clear that travel blogging allows bloggers to maximize the benefi ts of travel
beyond the trip itself.
Travel blogging becoming part of tourist practices implies that stages of the tourist experience
are blurred. Bosangit (2012) and Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier (2009) have emphasized how
bloggers blog while they are travelling and instantly capture moments through their mobile
phones and share them. Therefore, tourism researchers need to consider the implications for
theories of tourist experiences proposed to have stages of a linear nature (pre-travel, the travel
itself and post-travel). For example, evaluation, storing and enrichment of memories on
travel (Aho 2001) and remembering events (Larsen 2007) are said to be post-trip stage activities
but with blogging tourists are doing it during the travel itself and sharing it with their readers.
Tourism researchers should consider how this blogging phenomenon among tourists challenges
extant theories on tourist experience and its stages.
Travel blogs are valuable research data on tourists and their experiences. Table 38.2 provides
more examples of possible research areas and their insights to theories which may carry marketing
implications as well.

Marketing implications

Extant literature on travel blogging provides adequate empirical evidences of the use of travel
blogs as sources of information on tourists' behaviours, activities, perceptions and evaluations of
destinations and as word-of-mouth communication. The use of blogs for marketing and
management was highlighted by Lin and Huang (2006), Pan, Crotts and McLaurin (2007),
Akenhurst (2008), Schmalleger and Carson (2008), Mack and Blose (2008), Puhringer and Taylor
(2008), Volo (2010) and Xiang and Gretzel (2010), to name a few. Puhringer and Taylor (2008)
identifi ed a range of possible applications for consumer-generated content found in travel blogs
that would be useful for destination marketing organizations. These include:

1 identifying and monitoring trends in travellers' movement to and from the destination such
as previous and future stopover locations;
2 specifi c product evaluations and reviews of service standards;