Online Travel Communities Research Articles

Travelers With Disabilities: How Online Information Search Reduces Uncertainty About Service Accessibility in Hospitality and Tourism

Despite the significant number of travelers with disabilities and their substantial contribution to the tourism and hospitality industry, there has been a lack of research exploring the necessary services required by travelers with disabilities during their travels. Therefore, this study aims to identify accessibility issues encountered by travelers with disabilities during their travels and to examine the impact of these issues on their behavior in reducing uncertainty within the online travel community. To achieve the research objectives, the present study performed an integrated approach that combines text analytics and robust regression analysis. The findings of this study provide guidelines for tourism and hospitality management to reduce the perceived uncertainty experienced by travelers with disabilities, thereby promoting the accessibility of tourism and hospitality services.

Segmenting social media users in international tourism: Insights integrated from multi‐homing theory and international visitor survey data

AbstractThis study utilizes multi‐homing theory to assess international travelers' usage of social media platforms, revealing insights into their gender, country of origin, generation cohorts, and travel purposes. These insights can guide the development of effective social media marketing strategies for national destination management organizations (DMOs). Data from South Korea's 2019 International Visitor Survey (with 12,194 participants) was analyzed using chi‐square and correspondence analysis techniques. The results revealed distinctive preferences of international visitors among generational cohorts with different travel purposes across 19 countries in the usage of online travel communities, social network platforms, video‐sharing platforms, and travel blogs. Understanding the dynamics of social media platforms helps national DMOs enhance their social media marketing strategies for international visitors, based on the multi‐sided platform usage paradigm. Nevertheless, acknowledging the study's limitations points towards potential avenues for future research.

Motivations to share travel experiences in online travel communities: The moderating effect of dissatisfaction

Motivations to share travel experiences in online travel communities: The moderating effect of dissatisfaction

Unlocking Nontransactional Value Co-creation: Insights From Online Travel Communities

Online travel communities have been pivotal touchpoints for tourists to co-create nontransactional values with both platforms and other tourists. This study employed a mixed-method approach to examine the antecedents of tourists’ nontransactional value co-creation, including tourist-initiated and platform-initiated value co-creation, and its influence on the effective creation of knowledge value. The results of the quantitative study revealed both similarities and distinctions in the underlying mechanisms influencing tourist-initiated and platform-initiated value co-creation. These two forms of value co-creation also exhibited different impacts on the effectiveness of nontransactional value created in the co-creation process. The subsequent qualitative study further validated these similarities and distinctions while uncovering the underlying reasons. This study embodies the nature of bilateral participation from tourists and platforms in value co-creation, and provides theoretical and practical implications regarding nontransactional values in online travel communities, extending beyond transactional values, such as brand loyalty and purchase intention discussed in prior literature.

Online survey of visitation and tourist behaviour in a protected territory—the case of Urdini Lakes, Rila National Park

The lack of comprehensive and reliable data regarding visitation and tourist behaviour at local level and especially in vulnerable environment has been acknowledged long ago as an issue by both academics and practitioners. In Bulgaria, this type of data is scarce and inconsistent, regardless of the increased visitor flow in certain mountain areas. The mass adoption of social media, as well as the development of online travel communities, allow research with more ease the target population, as opposed to traditional resource-intensive monitoring methods. This paper presents the results of an online survey of visitors to Urdini Lakes in Rila National Park, Bulgaria. The aim of the study is to identify the overall recognition of the area and the extent of effective visit by mountaineers, as well as the profile of visitors and their behaviour. According to the results of this study, the influence of social media on visitation and tourist behaviour in the case of Urdini Lakes appeared lower than expected and much outweighed by factors like accessibility and trail difficulty. Further research should combine more innovative and mixed methodologies regarding the usage of social media and its influence, which can combine and compare different types of data such as surveys, geolocated big data and visual methods.

Investigation of antecedents and consequences of usefulness in online travel communities: The moderating role of decision making stage

This study examines the perceived usefulness (PU) of online discourse and the decision-making behavior of users in Online Travel Communities (OTCs). Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used on secondary data available in OTCs in the form of 852 threads to empirically test the proposed integrated model. The antecedents of the perceived usefulness of online travel communities were found to be the argument quality and credibility. These influence the PU of user-generated content significantly and are helpful in information adoption in OTCs. The PU of OTC discourse positively impacts travelers' information adoption and decision-making. The current study offers implications for OTCs and online service providers for enhancing the usefulness of user-generated content in OTCs and social media sites, leading to online information use and travel decision-making. Prior literature has explored the nature and magnitude of the influence of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) on information adoption and intention to use information for travel purchases from users' perspectives and has investigated the PU of third-party travel sites. This paper is an effort to examine PU and decision-making by analyzing the User-Generated-Content (UGC) posted by the actual users.

Review Evaluation for Hotel Recommendation

With the prevalence of backpacking and the convenience of using the Internet, many travelers like sharing their experiences in online communities. The development of online communities has changed the decision-making process of consumer purchasing, especially for travel, i.e., some travelers reconsider their decisions because they believe that the reviews of online communities are more valuable than advertisements. However, these reviews are not completely reliable since most reviews are provided without specific author information and the review data are too large to be observed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach (named ET) to evaluate the trustworthiness of reviews in online travel communities. Our method considers three concepts, including the sentiment similarity of reviewers in the social network, features of the reviews, and behaviors of the reviewers. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective in evaluating the trustworthiness of reviews.

Exploring cruise tourists' sentiment expression pattern from online reviews: An insight into market positioning

The accumulation of information on online travel communities provides a useful reference for tourists and reflects tourists' positive or negative sentiments during the whole experience process. Using over 97,000 online reviews, including 172 cruise ships across 16 brands, the current study applies sentiment analysis to explore how tourists express their sentiments about elements and attributes of the cruise experience and differences in market positioning. The results show that among 10 attributes and over 50 elements, attributes of enrichment activities, service, fitness, and recreation are the most pivotal antecedents of positive sentimental expression. Service, lecture, steward, show, snorkelling, spa, music, balcony, and the beach have shown high positive sentimental intensity. For negative sentimental expression, embarkation attributes, including elements of embarkation, debarkation, and disembarkation, are the dominant attribute. When tourists express negative sentiments, elements of the bed, casino, buffet, food, and staff are also exhibited higher intensity. As such, how other cruise attributes and elements stimulate the formation of tourists' sentiments is explored. Additionally, differences in tourists' sentiment expression in market positioning are identified, bringing a new research agenda to cruise brand positioning. This study provides a sentiment basis for a deep understanding of tourists' sentiment preference at cruise attribute and element levels to improve tourists' cruise experience. This study also exhibits a paradigm shift in sentiment research by establishing relationships between cruise attributes/elements and sentiment words.

Legitimacy in co-creating tourism value through customer-to-customer (C2C) online travel communities

ABSTRACT Legitimacy is a fundamental dimension of co-creation as it determines the desirability, suitability, and appropriateness of individuals or organisations in any community. This research explores how users establish legitimacy when co-creating value in online travel communities. The proliferation of online communities propels a bottom-up approach to legitimacy that resides at the micro level within online contexts and can be achieved through discursive legitimacy. The research context focuses on travellers during the COVID period and the online customer-to-customer (C2C) community they formulated. Travellers’ posts were analysed based on thematic analysis. Findings reveal the five discursive legitimation strategies used to legitimate or delegitimate proposed co-creation practices in tourism, namely: authorisation, rationalisation, trustification, normalisation and narrativisation. These were employed by multiple online users to influence travellers and were associated with discursive resources (technology affordances) to support narratives during times of contestations. The discursive strategies aided in creating two levels of customer-to-customer value co-created experiences. This research moves away from the dominant institutional approach to provide a novel understanding of legitimacy in tourism: discursive legitimacy, which is more relevant for online customer-to-customer (C2C) travel communities' co-creation practices.

Mental Time Travel in Online Travel Communities: The Application of Past and Future Time Orientations

This study identified travelers’ mental states related to key travel attributes at different stages of travel. Specifically, this study addresses three research foci: (1) the major topics discussed by online travel community members regarding European and Asian destinations; (2) the members’ future and past time orientations; and (3) the emotions associated with the topics discussed. To answer our research questions, we conducted topic modeling and language analysis to measure travelers’ temporal orientations (i.e., past and future orientations) and emotional states (i.e., positive and negative sentiments) as expressed on Reddit. We compared comments on the 20 most salient topics related to European and Asian destinations by topic weight, and classified the discussed topics on the basis of topic sentiment and temporal orientation. Our results identify the key travel attributes shared in the online sphere, where online travel community members express varying sentiments toward past and future experiences and events. The findings will benefit diverse travel industry stakeholders as well as researchers interested in online discourses.

The interaction effect of reward type and mindset on online travel community promotion intention: the mediating roles of identification and community commitment

ABSTRACT This study explores the interaction effect of reward type and mindset on community promotion in the online travel community guided by implicit theories. Three scenario-based experiments were undertaken to examine the interaction effect. Specifically, community members with a fixed mindset are more inclined to promote community when they obtain material rewards, while community members with a growth mindset are more inclined to promote community when they obtain emotional rewards. Identification and community commitment act as mediators between the interaction effect. In addition, this research also discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

Understanding continuous sharing behavior of online travel community users: a case of TripAdvisor

ABSTRACT Given the rapid development of the internet, the prospects for the online travel industry are promising, and online travel communities (OTCs) have become an invaluable platform for people exchanging travel information and making related decisions. However, the mobility and continuous sharing behavior of online travel community users has become a major source of uncertainty in platform management. To establish ways of regulating online communities and promoting innovation and development, this article builds on the knowledge and definitions of relevant concepts that we find in the research literature. Taking the online travel community as its research object and the TripAdvisor website as an example, based on social cognition theory and social exchange theory, this study identifies four community factors that influence the continuous sharing behaviors of users in online travel communities. The results show that richness of self-presentation, community identity, community support and community observation learning all have positive effect on the continuous sharing behavior of online travel community users. On this basis, the article offers comments and suggestions on the sustainable development of online travel agency enterprises.

Characterizing Ex situ Value: A Customer-Dominant Perspective on Value

Customer value, an important requirement for the success of tourism, is commonly seen as a phenomenon co-created between the tourist and the tourism provider. Positioned in the customer-dominant logic, this paper focuses on the tourist’s perspective and introduces the notion of ex situ value formed outside of the tourist-provider’s interaction and the on-site experiences. The forthcoming qualitative study, which is conducted in the context of an online travel community, explores customers’ travel-related experiences within their own lifeworld. The main contribution is the notion of ex situ value, which involves individual and collective experiences and develops a nuanced view of value emerging in customers’ experiential lifeworld. Thus, the article invites researchers to expand the boundaries of value into the customer lifeworld domain and encourages tourism providers to consider the tourists’ contexts outside the standard measurements of value (tourist and provider interactions as well as on-site experiences) as sources of customer value.

User Interactions in Online Travel Communities: A Social Network Perspective

Online travel communities (OTCs) enable users to interact and share travel information voluntarily. Extant research has primarily focused on the content generated through user interactions but neglected how user interactions are structured. This study employed exponential random graph models to examine the formation of user interactions and the outcomes of homophily in terms of network structure across levels (actor, dyad, triad, and network). A dataset of 2,926 posts and 25,854 replies involving 9,712 users in an OTC was used. Results reveal that users’ question initiating and replying ties in OTCs exhibit significant positive structural dependencies in terms of reciprocity, activity spread, generalized transitive closure, and multiple connectivity. Homophily serves as the basis of dyadic interactions and homophilous ties evolve after formation. The study advances hospitality and tourism network research and methodology by going beyond traditional dyadic user interactions, and provides insights into user interactions in OTCs from the social network perspective.

"Net" value co-creation: The effect of interactions on consumer citizenship behavior in online travel communities.

Online traveling community is initiated by companies, but its survival is inextricably linked to consumer citizenship behavior (e.g., out-group recommendation, in-group helping, and inward response). The majority of researches have investigated consumer behavior of brand community such as consumer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and purchase intention. A few scholars try to explore consumer behaviors beyond the purchase, like participation, which was concerned as the value co-creation. However, the value co-creation of the community should depend on consumers’ citizenship behaviors instead of their pure participation. Therefore, this study empirically examines the effect of consumer interaction on consumer psychology and citizenship behaviors of the online travel community. The findings demonstrated that consumer interaction facilitated participants’ self-identity and their perceived social support, which enhanced their community identification and thus their citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, the motivation of participation plays a moderator in this process. Specifically, symbolic motivation moderates the relationship between consumer interaction and their self-identity, while utilitarian motivation moderates the effect of consumer interaction on their perceived social support. These findings contributed to the intervention of consumer citizenship behavior in online traveling community and provide insights into the management of the online travel community from the perspective of the value co-creation.

Which User-Generated Content is Considered Useful by Tourists? An Investigation Into the Role of Information Types Shared in Online Discourse in Online Travel Communities

The objective of this study is to investigate the user-generated content (UGC) features that influence perceived usefulness (PU) and UGC use in Online Travel Community (OTC). The moderating role of information type on PU was then examined. Secondary data in the form of online travel threads in an OTC were selected for this study. The authors coded 536 threads consisting of 2592 travel postings. The data was analyzed using Smart PLS-SEM. The results indicate that the information usefulness is driven by discourse quality, emotional support, and credibility, which further influence UGC use for travel planning. Also, the information type influences the relationship between the constructs negatively. This study shows that online discourse among the community members enables potential tourists to utilize the information for their travel planning. Marketers should understand the factors enhancing the usefulness of UGC, and they should concentrate on information quality and diversity.

Identification of Travel Styles by Learning from Consumer-generated Images in Online Travel Communities

“A picture is worth a thousand words”: Never has this adage been more meaningful than it is today. Online social media is driving the growth of unstructured image data. Unstructured data must be structured to be informative and thereby contribute to user understanding and revenue generation. Hitherto, companies have only been able to accomplish this through tedious manual work. This paper demonstrates how image data can be analyzed automatically using a combination of image analysis methods and fuzzy cluster algorithms to predict user preferences, which companies can then use to make targeted offers. Several methods, including support vector machines (SVMs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are benchmarked across various cases of image data taken from an online travel community. Depending on the images’ diversity either a SVM or a CNN provides the best basis for preference prediction.

How to Frame Destination Foodscapes? A Perspective of Mixed Food Experience.

Foodscape conceptualizes the dynamic human–food–place nexus. Tourism provides a cross-cultural context where tourists can consume different destination foods and places, during which multiple types of destination foodscapes are produced. However, few studies explore how to frame the types and connotations of destination foodscape. Tourists’ travelogues provide a rich database to examine this question. Through netnography, this study collects and analyzes 86 posts of travelogues published from 2012 to 2019 in Mafengwo, a famous Chinese online travel community, about Chinese tourists’ food experiences in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We summarize five types of destination foodscapes, globalized recreational foodscape, staged local foodscape, glocalized foodscape, authentic local foodscape, and overseas ethnic foodscape in which tourists obtain different familiar-novelty hybrid experiences. This study contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue between food and tourism literature by proposing a coordinate framework with two axes, the spectrum of cultural distance and the spectrum of serving tourists/locals, to classify destination foodscape and a six-dimensional network construct to reveal the connotations of destination foodscape. Relevant strategies for promoting destination food and tourism development are also provided.

Intention to adopt user generated content on virtual travel communities: Exploring the mediating role of attitude

Online communities have brought major changes in the behaviour of consumers in the travel and tourism industry. Travellers frequently rely on the User General Content (UGC) to make their travel-related decisions. Avid travellers join travel communities and actively look for unbiased information, and share their own experiences. This paper explores the predictors of consumer attitude and intention to follow UGC posted on online travel communities. Further, this study attempts to analyze the influence of Customer Value Creation (CVC) on attitude and traveller’s intention to adopt UGC posted on online travel communities. Data collected from 246 members of online travel communities were analyzed using Structural Equation Modelling. Empirical results show that CVC has a significant direct and positive impact on travel information adoption intention and indirect influence through attitude. This study is among the few on the impact of CVC on attitude towards UGC posted on an online travel community and advances the literature on the subject by explaining the relative impact of CVC on attitude from a different theoretical perspective.

Cyberbullying Behaviors in Online Travel Community: Members’ Perceptions and Sustainability in Online Community

Online travel community (OTC) has been played a critical role for digital marketing in the travel industry. The successful operation of an online travel community is depending on social connection and active friendship among the OTC’s users. However, cyber-victimization has become a critical concern which has been threaten sustainable online travel community. In this regard, this study investigates how cyber-victimization recovery practices in OTAs affect online community ambient and behavioral loyalty in OTCs using second-order confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicate that the OTCs’ efforts to recover the online ambient against cyber-victimization lead OTC members to be loyal to the OTCs. Implications for the sustainable online travel community were discussed.