Tourism visual deception in “check-in tourism”: Value co-creation and co-destruction perspectives

Abstract

social media has changed the way tourism-related information is generated and disseminated. Research has focused on the benefits of social media for tourism management while ignoring its drawbacks. Using script theory and service-dominant (S-D) logic, this study explores whether visual deception in tourism can lead to value co-creation and co-destruction. We conducted a thematic analysis of 190,000 words of textual data from 29 interviews on xiaohongshu and Weibo and found that tourism visual deception resulted in the dual outcomes of value co-creation and co-destruction by multiple stakeholders involved in a co-participation process. In addition, the study revealed two types of tourism visual deception interactions in check-in tourism: feedback and learning. Each type of interaction has the dual potential for value co-creation and co-destruction, depending on the consistency of the operating scripts. However, script inconsistency does not necessarily lead to value co-destruction. This paper highlights the important role of social media platforms for value recovery. When value co-destruction occurs, social media platforms, bloggers, and tourists actively engage in value recovery and adopt co-recovery strategies to transform value co-destruction into co-creation. Meanwhile, we have discovered that the service restoration mechanism primarily relies on the interplay between service remedies, types of failures, response speed, and tourists' emotions. Our findings provide important theoretical contributions and practical insights for tourism deception research and marketing practice.