Muchazondida Mkono

The Othering of Food in Touristic Eatertainment: A Netnography

Adjectives such as ‘scary’, ‘yucky’ and ‘bizarre’, used in connection with food in touristic experience, illustrate tourists’ propensity to ‘Other’. In this paper, I use netnographic tourist reviews of two cultural restaurants to explore tourists’ self-interpretation of the Other as represented in food. The findings are organized under four themes, namely, ‘scary, unusual food’, ‘eating the authentic Other’ and ‘the reassurance in mixing familiar with unfamiliar’. It is recommended that future research on food in tourism experience should explore contexts that have not previously been viewed as culinary destinations to create more ‘situated’ knowledge. Further, netnography offers a novel approach which could reveal tourists’ subjective realities that are provided more candidly than in traditional qualitative methods.

Using Net-Based Ethnography (Netnography) to Understand the Staging and Marketing of “Authentic African” Dining Experiences to Tourists at Victoria Falls

Performativity is a phenomenon within authenticity theory in tourism that emphasizes the active participation of tourists in the authentication of tourism experiences. Tourists also seek tangible cultural objects to authenticate their experiences. In response, many restaurateurs selling “Africanness” of cultural products in Victoria Falls use electronic technologies to communicate both the tangibility and active participation attached to their offers. These messages create the expectation of an authentic experience in restaurant “eatertainment.” The article illustrates how two restaurants’ cultural product augmentations are represented online as tangibly and performatively authentic as well as how tourists respond to them as expressed in their online reviews.

Netnographic tourist research: the internet as a virtual fieldwork site

The Internet is emerging as a valuable fieldwork site for researching tourist experiences. This article argues that netnography, a web-based research technique developed by Robert Kozinets, could become more useful in tourism research as the Internet is increasingly normalized as part of everyday lifestyle. However, so far, in the field of tourism research, very few researchers have embraced netnographic techniques as alternatives or complements to traditional fieldwork methods such as faceto- face interviews and surveys. The article also considers the merits, opportunities, and challenges of netnographic tourism research, and provides suggestions for further study.

African as tourist.

This article argues that in most tourism studies the African has been stereotypically cast as a �touree� but not �tourer.� As such, mainstream theory in tourism is a product of a predominantly Western ethnocentric view of the tourist as a Westerner. In recent years, however, some authors have started to question modern-man-in-general approaches to the study of tourism, highlighting their failure to recognize the interface between culture and tourism. The article argues further that authenticity, for example, has been at the center of tourism sociological debate for decades, yet to date no attempts have been made to provide an African viewpoint. Indeed, the lack of African tourist studies which investigate culture specific meanings in relation to central debates in tourism has created an �African perspective gap� in tourism theory in general.

Beyond Reviewing: Uncovering the Multiple Roles of Tourism Social Media Users

Existing research on tourism social media users rarely extends beyond their role as appraisers of tourism and hospitality products. Such research fails to identify the different modes of experience and behavior that these users assume in their cyberspace interactions. This article demonstrates that user interactions entail much more than evaluating products. Using data from TripAdvisor, it identifies five additional user roles that define their experience and comportment online: troll, activist, social critic, information seeker, and socialite. Adopting a netnographic approach, these categories are interrogated to provide a more nuanced understanding of the online user experience in tourism social media space. Further, for each role, we glean the implicit uses and gratifications users seek from using the media. It is argued that the combined enactment of these roles creates a rich repository of experiential narratives that tourism businesses and destination managers can tap into for insights into the modern tourism consumer.

Sustainability and Indigenous tourism insights from social media: worldview differences, cultural friction and negotiation

ABSTRACT Indigenous tourism researchers have not fully embraced social media as fieldwork sites in their own right. This paper explores, from a social media perspective, the (online) engagement of Indigenous tour operators with tourists, the role of differences in tourist-Indigenous worldviews in the tour experience, and the sustainability implications. Data consisted of 588 tourist reviews and 137 operator responses, pertaining to four Indigenous tour experiences offered in Australia. Findings suggest that dissatisfied tourists expect tours to be run on Western management models, and in response, Indigenous tour operators have the opportunity to act as cultural negotiators online, explaining their own worldviews and cultural approaches. Three components of this cultural negotiation emerged: identifying and embracing worldview differences; delineating the larger cultural context of tours; and, rebuttal of misrepresentations in online tourist reviews. In addition, amongst themselves, tourists educate each other on cultural etiquette and interpretation. From a sustainability perspective it was found that Indigenous tour operator voices are minimally represented in tourism social media – a missed opportunity to correct cultural misconceptions and clarify differences, to “speak” for themselves, creating a stronger, more assertive online voice. Policy interventions to increase Indigenous operators’ participation in social media, including training and assistance, could help.

The future of tourism in Zimbabwe: towards sustainability

Before the political events after 2000, notably the Land Reform Program, Zimbabwe was a leading tourism destination in the Southern African region. However, political upheavals and consequent economic crises in the last decade damaged the attractiveness of the country as a tourist destination. Arrivals dropped drastically as the country was seen as unsafe for tourists. With the recent formation of the inclusive government in September 2008, and the gradual stabilization of the political and economic environments, it is hoped that the countrys tourism industry can be restored to its former competitiveness. This article discusses the struggles and dilemmas that the tourism industry continues to face as it aspires towards sustainability.

43. Tourism and Public Policy

Studying tourism public policy the study of institutional arrangements - constructing the rules of the game values in the tourism policy-making process the role of interest groups in the tourism policy process who wins and who loses? - aspects of power in tourism policy making monitoring and evaluting tourism public policy studying tourism policy.

‘Troll alert!’: Provocation and harassment in tourism and hospitality social media

With the advent of Web 2.0, social media have emerged as new spaces of hybrid interaction, comprising customer-to-customer, as well as customer-to-business/service-provider communicative exchanges. In the best case scenario, social media sites are communities where members find and share information, experience a sense of belonging, and provide mutual support. However, in many instances, the relatively anonymous nature of social media relieves some of the inhibitions of social interaction, resulting in negative behaviours such as harassment (for instance, in the form of trolling), flaming, and hate speech. This paper examines the phenomenon of trolling as a form of online provocation and harassment which targets users (including customers and businesses) in tourism social media spaces. Trolling remains largely unaddressed in the context of tourism (and hospitality) social media. Specifically, drawing data from TripAdvisor and other online media, the paper examines the incidences of (perceived) trolling and considers TripAdvisors responses to trolling behaviours.

Zimbabwe's tourism woes in the last decade: hindsight lessons for African tourism planners and managers

In the decade since the Millennium, the political and economic antics of Zimbabwe have attracted massive media attention. While this has been instrumental in creating international awareness of the country, for tourism the effect has been a drastic drop in arrivals. Tourism industry businesses recorded their lowest demand statistics in decades. Since 2008 however, arrivals have increased gradually, but the destination is still struggling to restore itself to its former glory as a competitive force in southern Africa. The thesis of this paper is that instead of letting Zimbabwes history in this respect go to waste, African tourism planners, and managers elsewhere, with the benefit of hindsight, can draw useful lessons for their own destinations. The aim is to stimulate academics and practitioners of tourism to reflect on the mistakes of planners in the past and forearm themselves for future planning decisions and research. Tourism planners cannot afford the luxury of learning only from their own mistakes: they need to learn from the mistakes of others.