The Dual Journey: Traveling On-site and Online

Abstract

Travel is increasingly imagined as a sociotechnical practice wherein ICTs are integrated with experience. In this context, in addition to the movement of the traveler within and between places, and encounters with peoples, cultures, and landscapes, the activity of travel is constituted within various forms of online interactions. Emphasizing this point, emerging industry and theoretical paradigms such as "smart tourism" propose the use of social media and digital devices as ubiquitous and essential to the future of tourism. This article uses the theoretical concept of mediatization—the integration and influence of media forms within social practice—to explore how the embeddedness of ICTs influences tourism, focusing on the avatar of online communication in particular. ICTs bridge distances in time and space, support the construction of personal identity and community, and channel the data flows permitting informationization, with these characteristics likewise being reflected in the textures of contemporary tourism. Tourists' use of ICTs is conceptualized through the model of the "dual journey," a vision of hybridized travel in which online and physical spheres are interwoven in the construction and consumption of tourist experience. The purpose of this conceptual investigation is not only to consider the intensification of communication within tourism but also to highlight the ways in which tourists' communicative practices are enfolded within, and become, tourism.