Abstract
India showcases a wide variety of tourism options which includes Historical Tourism, Pilgrimage Tourism, Adventure Tourism, Medical Tourism, Ayurveda Tourism, and many more. Currently, many researchers have used facework in a wide variety of disciplines including the Tourism Industry in India. However, research work that emerges on Social Networking Sites (SNS) is limited mainly to the examination of foreign tourists’ narrative accounts of experiencing culture shock in a country. Also, while comments visible on social networking sites (such as Twitter and Facebook) have been examined multiple times, yet none on Quora.com have been explicated in tourism studies. This paper addresses this gap by examining the narrative accounts of 84 foreign tourists, specifically, how they dealt with culture shock experienced by them, extracted from Quora.com between 20182019 using thematic analysis with Ting-Toomey's Face Negotiation Theory as a backdrop. Findings showed that the cultural dimension of Individualism-Collectivism (I-C) did not appear to have a direct bearing on approaches to handle culture shock in India and had no effect on the Indian tourism industry. The study concludes that international tourism in India does not suffer on account of communication or cultural factors, but on account of systemic and administrative failures. The study is beneficial for improvements in the tourism industry of India and other countries where culture shock has been identified as a hurdle to growth.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call