Travel Blogs Research Articles

Advantages of Marketing Communication in the Development of a Tourism Brand

A culturally thriving nation needs comprehensive tourism. Holistic tourism considers economic growth, cultural preservation, and inheritance, as well as cultural improvement and innovation. The tourism development will assist transportation, hotel, dining, commerce, cultural, and sports sectors. Also, the statistics show that travellers often choose positive-message locations. Many developing countries perceive tourism as a way to achieve long-term growth and are keen to expand worldwide. This study examines how tourists perceive China, particularly Zhanjiang. This place has beautiful scenery, a rich cultural legacy, and cultural heritages. China's tourist services are well-known. This study examines ways to better understand a tourist town's image to help develop national tourism (Zhanjiang). This study will identify contemporary issues in Zhanjiang's tourism by evaluating the current condition and researching the audience's impression. To understand secondary data, examine various media, Zhanjiang's website, news, and blogs. Marketing communication is vital for building a tourism brand. Conversations from relatives and friends, user-generated social media posts, internet celebrity affectionate referrals, corporate media on-site reports, famous film, and television viewfinders, Zhanjiang's official media attention platform, tourist industry projects of travel agencies and blogs created impactful tourists' perceptions of comprehensive tourism. This article addresses establishing a tourism brand in Zhanjiang and developing a marketing plan.
 
 
 Received: 30 August 2022 / Accepted: 20 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022

THE WRITING STYLE IN TRAVEL BLOGS

This paper focuses on the writing style in travel blogs. Its aim is to research stylistic forms typical of travel blog entries and their contribution to the functions of the travel blog as a whole. In the theoretical part of the paper, we present the characteristic features of a travel blog and the language trends in the digital age. Travel blogs have been defined as digital media settings. Blogs were once defined as websites that included bloggers’ entries and were regularly updated. They were often compared to personal journals. Today blogs have a rather complex structure and they fulfil several functions: bloggers can use their writing to stand out from the crowd, to share their experiences, opinions, once-private thoughts, and even to create a source of income. As a result, blogs are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Furthermore, travel blogs fulfil a variety of functions: the self-portraying, informative, entertaining, evaluative, advertising, instructive, and communicative function. Bloggers want to inform their followers as well as they can, but because of todays flood of information on the web, they must be careful not to let their followers drown in information. Blogs are thus characterized by syntactic compression. In the travel blogs we have analyzed, this is achieved through various linguistic means, such as nominalizations, the usage of infinitival constructions, elisions, and the usage of passive structures. These means fulfil several functions at the same time: they both convey information and help the bloggers maintain the contact with their followers. Finally, it should be noted that the present stylistic analysis has been carried out on a sample of only three travel blogs; its results should therefore not be used as a basis for generalizations. To comprehensively describe and systematize the communicative and functional aspects of the travel blog format, a larger data set consisting of several travel blogs should be analysed. In the upcoming doctoral dissertation, we are going to focus on aspects of this media format which have been only briefly mentioned in the present paper. Among them are multimodal resources, mediality, the interaction between bloggers and readers, the effect of bloggers' network on the individual text modules, and the role of embedding other semiotic resources such as videos.

Rise of the 21st-Century Black South African Travelogue: Itineraries of Touring and Testing Freedoms

This article shines a spotlight on the 21st-century growth of published travel books and blogs by black South Africans, with a focus on the 2013–20 period. It concerns itself with the publication of black South African travelogues of various kinds during the tumultuous post-transition years of the century's second decade, marked in extremis by the Marikana massacre. The period gave rise to diverse black literary-cultural forms, including travel texts with their spatial explorations and searching meditations. Through a survey of popular black post-2012 travelogues, many by women, I explore how the texts pursue spatial horizons and probe the parameters of the nation, continent, and world. The article engages with South Africa's heightened historical and contemporary contexts of racialized mobility and border tightening against which to examine impetuses and articulations of boundary-traversing black travel. Its dual focus is on travelogues that venture across the African continent and on those that cover the length and breadth of South Africa, if taking in some trips beyond. It engages with works by Sihle Khumalo, Zukiswa Wanner, Lerato Mogoatlhe, Niq Mhlongo, Lesego Malepe, Fikile Hlatshwayo, and the Black Project Children of Post-Apartheid South Africa collective. On one level, the travelogues are concerned with claiming the map and the page, centering black travel subjectivities. On another level, the texts evaluate and calibrate the extent to which post-apartheid, post-Marikana South Africa has "traveled" in relation to its fraught past and how it is faring in relation to imagined futures. As the travelogues reach and breach South Africa's borders, they draw on senses of distance—spatial and temporal—to reflect on individual lives, national trajectories, and considerations beyond. The article thus attends to how the travelogues explore what black South African freedoms mean, what it is to be black and on the move in 21st-century contexts, and how questions of the nation and other identifications push and pull in space, as well as in time. In sum, the article argues that the travelogues test concepts of freedom through negotiating and narrating mobility in and beyond contemporary South Africa with all its instabilities, contradictions, and hopes.

Tourism Promotion Symbols for Bandung City in a Teenager Romantic Film ‘Dilan 1990’

Film induced tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors in the tourism industry because cinematographic history is able to persuade the audience to travel to places that are used as the setting places of several scenes in a film. This study aims to examine the message of tourism promotion in a teenager romantic film set in Bandung, West Java, entitled ‘Dilan 1990’ which was adapted from a novel by Pidi Baiq of the same title. The data were collected by observing the film using observation tables, as well as audience reviews obtained through internet searches as a reference in interpreting symbols and knowing the audience's reception of this film. The audience’s reviews were taken from various websites including the Internet Movie Database, TripAdvisor, and from several independent travel blogs articles. The analysis used a qualitative descriptive method using three theories, namely, the theory of semiotics, reception, and promotion. The analysis shows that symbols of tourism promotion in the content of the film ‘Dilan 1990’ included the beautiful and clean city of Bandung, Bandung’s natural scenery, and Bandung’s heritage iconic buildings. The positive images of Bandung city were aesthetically presented on the film through well-structured of plot story, scene, and acting, thus make the promotion of Bandung become indirectly powerful. This study also stresses that the ‘Dilan 1990’ not only provide a powerful form of promotion for Bandung city but also has inspired the local government to build new city parks namely ‘Taman Dilan 1’ and ‘Taman Dilan 2’ that boosted the images of Bandung as an attractive city to visit.

Instagram as a Tool to Counter the Image of Countries as Unsafe: the Case of #LiveLoveLebanon

The emergence of social media has created new means of intercultural engagement. On Instagram, there is a growing trend of travel pages and travel bloggers whose aim is to introduce and share the highlights of the destinations they travel to. Locals in these destinations also wish to portray their country positively and promote it as a tourist destination, particularly in certain countries of the Middle East where there is the added challenge of an ‘unsafe’ image to combat. This research focuses on Lebanon to find out to what extent Instagram can be considered a means to this end, and if users who come across depictions of Lebanon on Instagram perceive the country as a potential tourist destination. The study draws on Said’s conception of the ‘other’ (1978), Hall’s system of representations (1980) and Pieterse’s hybridization paradigm (1996), and it used a mixed methods approach combining surveys and semi-structured interviews with Canadian participants. Findings broadly show that while Instagram can effectively be considered a tool to counter the ‘unsafe’ image of Lebanon, and while the country may be branded as a potential tourist destination to users who come across favorable depictions of it, algorithm restrictions limit the potential for such contents to fulfill their potential as they do not always reach users who perceive Lebanon to be an ‘unsafe’ place.

Network Structure Features and Influencing Factors of Tourism Flow in Rural Areas: Evidence from China

Exploring the spatial network structure of tourism flow and its influencing factors is of great significance to the transmission of characteristic culture and the sustainable development of tourism in tourist destinations, especially in backward rural areas. Taking Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture (hereinafter referred to as Qiandongnan Prefecture) as an example, this paper adopts social network analysis and Quadratic Assignment Procedure regression analysis to study the network structural characteristics and influencing factors of tourism flow using online travel blog data. The results show that: (1) There are seasonal changes in tourism flow, but the attractions that tourists pay attention to do not change with the seasons. (2) The tightness of the tourism flow network structure is poor. The core nodes are unevenly distributed, and there are obvious structural holes. (3) The density of the tourism flow network is low. There is a clear core–periphery structure in the network, and the core area has a weak driving effect on the periphery area. There are more cohesive subgroups in the network, but the degree of connectedness between the subgroups varies greatly. (4) Geographical adjacency, transportation accessibility, and tourism resource endowment influence tourism flow network structure. The study found that the influencing factors of tourism flow in rural areas are different from those in urban areas. These results provide useful information for the marketing and development of tourism management departments in rural areas.

PERSONAL BRANDING TRAVEL BLOGGER MELALUI MEDIA SOSIAL INSTAGRAM (Analisis Isi Pesan pada akun @her_journeys)

The development of communication technology, especially in the use of new media affects various aspects of communication and the development of ways of communicating. The use of new media, namely social media, is used by individuals to form personal branding. Personal branding is a process that uses the values, characteristics, and advantages of individuals to make themselves different and highlight their qualities from others. The focus of this research is to identify and analyze the content of personal branding messages, especially personal branding elements and personal branding laws proposed by (Montoya & Vandehey, 2002) which appear in posts through Anggey Anggraini's Instagram Travel Blogger social media account @her_journeys. Therefore, this research uses quantitative content analysis method. The sampling technique used purposive sampling to determine the period of content being analyzed based on two units of analysis, namely photos and captions. The results of the study indicate that the characteristics based on personal branding elements are time and repetition, while based on personal branding laws, stand out in the sub categories of personality, distinctiveness, unity, persistence, and goodwill.

Sense of Place: Narrating Emotional Experiences of Malaysian Borneo through Western Travel Blogs

Tourists’ sense of place or destination attachment could play an important role in destination branding. Yet, sense of place literature focuses on residents as the concept originates from a long-term residence in one place. This study explores the role of destination attachment based on tourist experience for branding based on a case study in Malaysian Borneo. A qualitative content analysis using QCAmap of 34 blogs extracted 116 blogposts with narratives containing emotional sentiments from international tourists. Findings uncovered six important attributes: namely nature, adventure, environment, culture, conservation, and education associated with destination attachment. Findings show that these attributes are interconnected as the main attribute, nature, produces other attributes. A tourists’ sense of place model for destination attachment is proposed to understand how tourists develop attachment to a place.

Understanding Destination Value Co-Creation on Social Media: An Application of Travel Blog Analysis

The sharing of travel experiences through social media platforms reflects contemporary consumer culture, but it is still a phenomenon being researched in tourism literature. In this paper, we theorize that sharing travel experience through social media may operate as a distinct social communication process, and investigate how it contributes to the co-creation of destination value. A qualitative analysis of 97 travel blogs reveals three distinct themes that have the potential for co-creating destination value: motivation, memorable travel experiences, and advice. The results indicate that tourists and destination marketers interpret destination value differently in motivation. The sharing of memorable travel experiences and advice with readers and fellow tourists improves potential tourists’ cognition and emotional connection to the destination, thereby increasing the level of tourist destination engagement. The extension of the consumer socialization framework provides a deeper understanding of the destination value co-creation process, and provides useful insights for destination promotion and management.

Travel blogging, professionalism, and the changing boundaries of knowledge production

Bloggers have long been seen as challenges to journalistic authority. This study focuses specifically on professional travel bloggers and their own self-understandings of what it means to be a professional. Is this understanding distinct from the professional structures that guide journalism? How might these different self-understandings impact the knowledge produced by each group of media workers? The implications of this project are particularly important given that people rely on travel media to help construct their own understandings of distant locations. It is crucial to understand the epistemic foundations of that location-based knowledge. Findings from this purposive survey sample indicate that travel bloggers’ specialized knowledge comes largely in the form of self-marketing and creating a recognizable brand. In keeping with previous findings from blog content analyses, showcasing authenticity is also seen as crucial for blogging success.

In the travel bloggers’ wonderland: mechanisms of the blogger – follower relationship in tourism and hospitality management – a systematic literature review

PurposeEven if the relationship between travel bloggers and followers has implications for tourists’ decision-making process, the literature does not individuate the main determinants of this relationship. This paper aims to study the drivers and motivations to follow travel bloggers and the main consequences. Moreover, the paper seeks to highlight the metamorphosis of travel bloggers and their role in the tourism industry.Design/methodology/approachA systematic literature review was used, and 76 papers were selected. A thematic map of the literature and a summary of key findings are proposed.FindingsAlthough authenticity is the main trigger for following travel bloggers, other factors (e.g. transparency and credibility), if lacking, can erode the relationship with followers. Results demonstrate that hygiene factors are important but that the relationship with followers can be compromised if motivational factors are lacking. Loyalty and the continued use of travel blogs are the main consequences of a relationship based on trust, credibility and engagement.Practical implicationsTourism and hospitality managers must define sophisticated segmentation procedures to select the right travel blogger with which to engage for destination promotions. Travel bloggers must clearly define the role that they want to have in the market if they are to instill loyalty in their followers.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that attempts to identify the pillars of the follower–travel blogger relationship in the tourism and hospitality literature.

Solo female visitors in museum tourism: an exploration based on social practice theory

ABSTRACT Despite the fast growth of solo female travelling market, the travelling experience of solo female travellers is still lack of in-depth research. The heterogeneity of museum visitors also makes solo female visitors worthy of more discussion. Based on qualitative data collected through interviews and online travel blogs, and taking the four elements of social practice theory as theoretical framework, this study concluded that settings including the intangible assets and spatial functions of museums, constituted the basis of other elements, while the others (materials, competences and meanings) made up the practice of solo female visitors in museums. Meanings mainly included knowledge construction, social connection, and self-construction, which were linked with competences that solo female visitors obtained and also had an impact on their daily life. Practical suggestions on museum management were provided according to the element of materials, which was reflected in online and offline exhibition spaces, cultural and creative products.

Tourist Gaze at Chinese Classical Gardens: The Embodiment of Aesthetics (Yijing) in Tourism

Classical gardens offer ample cultural and natural landscapes for visitors to appreciate. Taking the tourist gaze as a theoretical lens, this study assumes a netnographic approach and conducts narrative analysis on travel blogs to explore visitors’ experiences at Chinese classical gardens. Findings revealed key domains of the gaze object (i.e., macro-level structural design and micro-level elements) and the way of gaze (i.e., spatial and temporal), which formed the Chinese gaze in the tourism context. Results further showed how gaze contributed to Yijing development, a unique Chinese aesthetic concept. This study enriches the tourism and aesthetics literature by positioning a classical aesthetic concept (Yijing) within a modern tourism practice (gaze). Practical implications for tourism development and destination marketing are provided.

Stakeholders’ Synergies in Developing Smart Tourism Destination. A Phenomenographic Study

This study aims to investigate the stakeholders' synergies in realising smart tourism destination. This study uses a qualitative method with a phenomenography approach. We adopted stakeholders' theory to valued stakeholder roles and perception in pursuing sustainability, competitiveness and managing smart tourism destination in Wonosobo, Indonesia. In-depth interviews with five main stakeholders' namely local government, media, tourism business, tourism community, and travel bloggers followed by three phenomenography qualitative data analysis stages. The findings have revealed some obstacles in implementing smart tourism from stakeholders' perspectives, such as human resource's ability, stakeholders' synergy, and government support. This study has also revealed six factors: public system development, digital promotion, Internet infrastructure, public and private sectors partnership, and human resources development to support smart tourism. This study has proposed the strategic plan for the local government to support smart tourism destinations, namely: partnerships, government support, human resource’s ability, and tourism business competitiveness, that will lead to smart tourism destinations. This study has provided a framework and managerial implication accordingly.

The Potential of Travel Bloggers in Marketing Tourist Destinations: The Example of The “A Blogger for Italy” Platform

The study analyses the role of the travel blogger as a contemporary expression of tourism marketing. In the new digital reality, travel bloggers perform the intermediary function between destination and customer that in the offline world has long been performed by traditional tour operators and travel agents. The message of these influencers can be much more effective than the expensive advertising campaigns implemented by tourism organizations through traditional marketing channels. Establishing a connection between travel bloggers and tour operators, therefore becomes a crucial strategy for exploiting the potential offered by the ITC in the field of tourism promotion. Within this vision, and as an example of good practice, the study illustrates the digital platform "A blogger for Italy" which is one of the first attempts to create, at a national level, a structured network between travel bloggers and tour operators. The study suggests that travel bloggers can become ambassadors of territoriality especially with reference to places away from the usual mass tourism routes and for which a growing segment of tourism demand shows renewed interest.

LES MÉCANISMES SOCIODISCURSIFS DE L’ENCHANTEMENT DANS LES BLOGS VOYAGE

Within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, we analyze how the enchantment concept (Réau / Poupeau 2007; Winkin 2002) finds its way on travel blog productions. To do so, we work on a corpus of 114 posts, 115 photos and 345 comments. We shed light on the discursive, enunciative and semiotic strategies implemented by authors to immerse readers in an imaginary world where reality gives way to the marvellous. How, in travel blog situations, do bloggers seduce web users? And in what way their audience seems to respond to these attempts? How does denial of market and social realities work in online travel stories? After having placed this scientific work within the current research trends which question discourses and travels, we describe the methodology we use to identify, in the bloggers’ productions and their readers’ comments, the mechanisms the authors deploy to create the illusion of a perfect destination before revealing some of our linguistic and semiotic findings. Eventually, we demonstrate that readers are far from being the naive interlocutors one might assume.

A framework for recommending tourist attractions using deep learning and association rule mining-based methods

Abstract. Many of tourism recommendation researches are based on the user rating and review data on the tourism platforms, and these approaches might be only suitable for a discrete recommendation for the tourist attractions. It is because each rating and review data on the platforms is created for a tourist place, not for multiple places on a travel itinerary. A travel blog data often contains information about the multiple places on a travel itinerary, but it is difficult to analyse the data compared to the rating and review data since it is like a text document having longer text than the review. In this paper, we introduce a framework consisting of a deep learning-based tourist-attraction extraction method from the blog text and an association rule mining-based recommendation method to recommend a list of tourist attractions that might be favourable to visit together in a travel itinerary.

Language means of transmitting national-cultural identity in texts of italian-speaking travel blogs

Language means of transmitting national-cultural identity in texts of italian-speaking travel blogs

Extracting Network Patterns of Tourist Flows in an Urban Agglomeration Through Digital Footprints: The Case of Greater Bay Area

Network patterns of tourist flows can reveal differences in tourism resources among destinations from the perspective of network science, providing valuable suggestions for tourism managers and policymakers to promote the balanced and sustainable development of tourism. This paper focuses on urban agglomerations, a highly developed spatial form of integrated cities, and proposes a research framework to extract the network patterns of tourist flows through digital footprints. Based on an illustrative case study using geo-located travel blog data from Qunar.com, we built a tourist flow network for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), China. The analysis shows: (1) GBA’s tourist flow network is obviously heterogeneous, showing a pattern of “four cores and three poles”; (2) the strong “administrative barrier effect,” revealed by community detection within the network, is the main obstacle to integrating regional tourism; (3) strengthening the infrastructure of tourism mediation cities such as Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Shenzhen, so as to avoid the “structural hole” caused by the tourist flows between cities, is an urgent issue that the GBA government needs to address. To summarize, the research framework can provide a theoretical basis and concrete suggestions for the planning and management of the tourism industry in urban agglomerations.

Comparing textual genres in Spanish: the case of the tourism domain

Tourism is one of the most important specialized domains in Spain. For this reason, many linguistic studies related to tourism texts have been carried out in the last few years. In this work, we focus on three of the most frequent and difficult textual genres written in Spanish in this domain: the informative article, the travel blog post, and the rules and regulations (for tourist accommodation facilities). The goals of this research are two: a) to carry out a linguistic analysis of the three aforementioned genres from the tourism domain on the textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse levels to gain a comprehensive understanding of the features of these text types, and b) to compare these genres in order to identify statistically significant differences among them and show that some specific linguistic features are prototypical of each one. To achieve these goals, we compiled a corpus in Spanish comprised of texts corresponding to the analysed genres. Then, we analysed linguistic features from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Finally, we carried out a comparative analysis using statistical techniques that shed light on significant differences between the genres.