Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
travellers to search for information and to make decisions on-the-go thereby creating what are
described as 'Tourism Activated Networks' (Zack and Gretzel 2011; Wang and Xiang 2012). It is
argued that mobile technology such as smartphones (and iPads) can be used to strengthen
travellers' social ties and interactions. For many people, a mobile phone is far beyond a
communication tool or an accessory of daily lives, and it has become an inseparable part of his/
her life or even body (Turkle 2011; Wang and Fesenmaier 2012). As such, the ubiquitous
presence of these devices in people's lives potentially intensifi es and encourages the participation
in mobile social networking. According to a report by comScore, in the United States (2011),
36 per cent of smartphone users use smartphone's browser to access social networks and
approximately 42 per cent of smartphone users access social networks through smartphone
applications. As a result, the users of social networks and messengers have become one of the
major components in terms of mobile Internet traffi c (comScore 2012). Therefore, the notion of
'travel in the network' implies that tourism marketing must be built upon a solid understanding
of social connectivity and dynamic decision making within mobile contexts.
These radical changes in travel behaviour are mirrored by a host of new tools in research
methodology including text analysis, netnography, social network analysis and a variety of
customer driven forecasting systems. These new approaches have been developed to take
advantage of the inherent quality of travel - they are huge creators of data through the multitude
of 'touch points' within the trip whereby travellers leave 'traces' based upon product searches,
reviews and purchases, the sharing of experiences with family and friends, and from reports in
the news (Gretzel
et al
. 2012). Particularly, the networks that surround travellers in trip planning
and their mobility encompass systems that capture and generate an enormous amount of
consumer data, and the so-called 'Big Data' offer numerous opportunities and pose new
challenges for tourism marketing. For example, destinations and tourism businesses are now
engaged in brand and reputation management by tracking and monitoring consumer sentiments
about their products and brands in social media and search queries and clickstream data can be
used to make inferences about the visitor volume to a destination and even hotel revenues.
Also, the emergence of 'geo-location' data enables businesses to identify movement patterns,
preferences and levels of loyalty within a destination. Thus, the new systems supporting a variety
of destination metrics (typifi ed by Google Analytics) enable marketers in tourism to better
understand where and how potential and existing visitors live, the nature of information used to
plan a trip, as well as with whom travellers share their experiences before, during and after the
trip. These business analytic applications support this new paradigm by offering enhanced
customer intelligence, improving business processes and, ultimately, enabling the development of
new strategies for navigating an increasingly competitive environment.
Conclusions
The tourism industry has responded to the various forces of change by adopting a new paradigm
that embraces innovation which is led by travellers' co-creation activities. Once thought of
as a 'problem' which could not be controlled, it appears that many leaders within the industry
now recognize the 'brilliance' of this strategy through the extensive use of customer relationship
management (CRM) programs, the use of social media/user generated media such as Facebook
and TripAdvisor, videos, blogs and tweets, and customer driven innovation (CDI) which are
used to create new travel products such as the Quilt Gardens Tour in Northern Indiana (Lee,
Tussyadiah and Zach 2010). The revolution over the past two decades appears to have taken hold,
and now offers the means for both the traveller and the industry to realize a future just imagined
a few years ago.
