The Impact of Online Social Media on the Tourist Industry

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The Internet has fundamentally reshaped the way tourism related information is distributed and the way people plan for and consume travel (Buhalis & Law, 2008). In recent years, the online social media (OSM) creates a tremendous trend on the Internet which impacts the whole travel and tourism industry.
The OSM, representing various forms of consumer-generated content (CGC) which means it can be text, images, video or other digital information posted and shared by end-users. For example, the blogs, virtual communities, wikis, social networks, collaborative tagging, and media flies shared on sites like YouTube and Flickr, have gained substantial popularity in online travelers’ use of the Internet (Gretzel, 2006; Pan, MacLaurin, & Crotts, 2007). Today, the numbers of OSM users are still increasing. With over 500 million active users, Facebook is now used by 1 in every 13 people on earth, with over 250 million of them who log in every day (digitalbuzzblog, 2011). Besides, Twitter hosts 175 million users who on an average week post one billion tweets (Twitter, 2011); YouTube users view daily over 3 billion videos (YouTube, 2011); and there are over 170 million blog’s users around the world (BlogPulse, 2011). Consequently, the percentage of the OSM users is continuously growing; therefore, it is potential for further expansion. In other words, people are relying on the OSM and using it becomes part of the peoples’ daily life.
In travel and tourism industry, the behavior of the traveler has always been influenced by developments in Information Communication Technologies (Buhalis, 1998; Poon, 1993). People are tended to search the travel related information through the OSM before they plan to travel. According to the Travel Industry Asso...

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...er, 1997; Jensen, 1996; Nilson, 1992). And the most crucial factor are the customer loyalty, satisfaction (Cronin, Brady, & Hult, 2000; Sweeney & Soutar, 2001). For that reason, the identification of the types of customer value perceived by travelers using social media for trip planning purposes is very essential, because it can provide significant and the functionality of social media in order to enhance their web traffic, usage and competiveness (Crompvoets, Rajabifard, Bregt, & Williamson, 2004).
While navigating the OSM, people may engage in not only goal-oriented activities, but also recreational behaviors (Grant et al., 2008; Vogt and Fesenmaier, 1998). Though reading the travel stories by other travelers, the traveler might feel enjoyable and relaxed. Then, an individual may be immersed in plentiful information and learn extensively (Hoffman & Novak, 1996).

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