Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Carson (2008) suggested that an alternative - and perhaps more successful - approach to using
travel blogs would be to have a more specifi c set of questions to ask of the data. In addition, he
pointed out that strategies in reducing noise, in locating blogs and analyzing the profi les of the
authors and the content will reduce the cost of blog analysis. Wenger (2008), on the other
hand, suggested identifying important blog authors who may have more valuable insights of
marketing; in other words, being selective of which blogs to use for research. Blog Visualer, a
system reducing the amount of searching and collating the user has to do to get the required
destination information from relevant blogs had been proposed by Sharda and Ponnada (2008)
to tackle this issue. This system is capable of creating a virtual tour of the destination for the
traveller based on the extracted information from current blogs. Magnini, Crotts and Zehrer
(2011) noted that the amount of consumer research invested in blog analysis appears to fall
short of what is invested in other consumer research initiatives such as comment cards and
satisfaction surveys; they thus suggest that blogs can be considered as another utility for this
traditional practice. There is also much scope for exploring various methods for extracting
desired information out of the naturally occurring, vast and diverse rich narratives of travel blogs.
Banyai and Glover (2012) call for investigating current research methods appropriate for
analyzing blog content. Alternative methods for analyzing travel blogs, such as netnography,
collaborative ethnography and technobiography can provide a deeper analysis than content and
narrative analyses which are currently the most used methods.
Conclusion
Despite the growth in research on travel blogs over the years, there are still many areas left
unexplored in the blogging phenomenon and virtual online communities of tourists. There are
possibly more theoretical and marketing implications not outlined here; however, it is hoped
that this chapter has encouraged future research on travel blogs. Blogs are Internet content
created, owned, managed and consumed by individuals (Huang, Shen, Lin and Chang 2007) and
they represent the voices and opinions of tourists that are found be a more powerful form of
traditional word-of-mouth communication. Hence, their importance as a research data and
marketing tool cannot be over-emphasized. To maximize the use of travel blogs as research
data, challenges and issues should be turned into opportunities for a more in-depth analysis of
tourists and their experiences. Tourism marketers and researchers have to focus on the advantages
of blogs such as those outlined by Hookway (2008: 92-3):
1 they provide a publicly available, low-cost and instantaneous technique for collecting
substantial amounts of data;
2 they are naturalistic data in textual form, allowing the creation of immediate text without
the resource intensiveness of tape recorders and transcriptions;
3 they enable access to populations otherwise geographically or socially removed from the
researcher; and
4 the archived nature of blogs makes them amenable to examining social processes across space
and time, particularly trend and panel type longitudinal research.
Blogs and virtual communities along with other social media should be recognized for
their signifi cant practical, theoretical and methodological contributions to the development
of tourism studies.
