Szilvia Gyimóthy

The collaborative economy and tourism: Critical perspectives, questionable claims and silenced voices

House swapping, ridesharing, voluntourism, couchsurfing, dinner hosting and similar innovations epitomize the collaborative economy. The rise of the collaborative economy, also known as collaborative consumption, the sharing economy and peer-to-peer consumption, has been fuelled by a range of social, economic and technological factors, including a shift away from ownership towards temporary access to goods; the use of technology mediated transactions between producers and consumers; direct host-guest relationships that contribute to a higher level of perceived authenticity of tourism experiences; and higher levels of consumer risk-taking balanced against mechanisms such as peer-to-peer feedback designed to engender trust between producers and consumers. This paper explores and critically assesses the collaborative economy and its implications for tourism industrial systems. It achieves this by mapping out the current knowledge dynamics characterizing tourism and the collaborative economy, paying particular attention to the asymmetries of knowledge that are emerging. The paper then identifies and critically discusses five pervasive claims being made about the collaborative economy, arguing for a balanced assessment of such claims. Highlighting these claims allows us to pursue a more reflective research agenda and leads to a more informed, evidence-based assessment of the collaborative economy and tourism.

The service triad: modelling dialectic tensions in service encounters

Models of service encounters are often fraught with reductionism, describing business relationships as mathematical combinations of dyadic constellations. Metaphors of ideal social relationships (marriages or friendships) are highlighted to stress normative aspects of equal, balanced and long-term business partnerships. However, these approaches are limited in their analytical sensitivity, as they cannot address the complexity of multipart relationships, where meanings, roles and relationships are continuously constructed and reconstructed. In order to understand the ambivalent quality of business interactions, this article analyses the corporate travel market by applying Simmels depiction of the triad as a specific social form. Triadic constellations and more complex service networks involve dialectic tensions, simultaneously exhibiting loyalty and disloyalty, trust and distrust, empowerment and disempowerment. It is argued that a qualitative methodology is a more adequate approach to grasp such dynamic and contextual social realities, because (opposed to a quantitative approach) it is not confined to operate with mutually exclusive analytical categories.

Tourism Social Media: Transformations in Identity, Community and Culture

This volume addresses the transformative power of tourism social media and offers novel theoretical and methodological approaches to its academic investigation. Acknowledging the collective value creation mechanisms of new media, the authors explore how technology nurtures, augments and modifies social or commercial interactions in tourism. The book emphasizes the role of fantasy and imagination in fluid tourism experiences and critically scrutinizes contested concepts pertaining to human interaction in cyberspace, such as equality, anonymity, transparency, democratization, and publicity culture. The chapters summon insights from Media Studies, Actor-Network Theory, Communicative Action and Symbolic Convergence among others, and offer a palette of emerging methods suitable for academic enquiries of virtual worlds. The theoretical grounding, empirical evidences, and interdisciplinary analysis of the anthology expand the actual research agenda and shed light on conceptual tensions and ambiguities in the present literature. As such, Tourism Social Media: Transformations in Identity, Community and Culture contributes to increasing research reflexivity in tourism studies at large.

Casual observers, connoisseurs and experimentalists: a conceptual exploration of niche festival visitors.

Abstract Although “amateur spectators” as a growing segment is mentioned in a number of special interest event studies, our understanding of their behaviour is still limited to case‐specific descriptions, and convenience explanations. This paper attempts to conceptualize and explore further the segment of “casual observers” by integrating several non‐adjacent theoretical areas. This endeavour intersects festival and event motivation studies, sport marketing literature and sporting subcultures from leisure sociology. Following a mixed method methodology, the paper presents both qualitative and quantitative data to illuminate attendee characteristics of a special event, namely, the world’s largest extreme sports festival. Results indicate that beyond two previously documented motivational inclinations directed at the sport or the event respectively, there exists a third type of visitor (experimentalists) who are mostly motivated by attaining intrinsical goals, such as identity construction by consuming “fetish” items at a niche festival. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the marketing potential of this group and discusses the implications for event sport event segmentation.

Tourism Social Media: A New Research Agenda

Advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) have brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges to tourism as an information-intensive industry. Currently the Internet is evolving into a web of increasingly interactive communication platforms, which is once again transforming the virtual landscape of tourism. The emerging ‘‘Web 2.0’’ is claimed to be more participatory and inclusive, as it allows users to create, publish, and comment on digitized content worldwide. It provides a new generation of technological tools, enabling users to develop online communities and networks by collaborating and distributing Internet content and customizing applications (Vickery & Wunsch-Vincent, 2007). Web 2.0 is inherently collective; it is no longer just an informational medium, but a technology that nurtures, augments, and modifies social interactions and communication (Weinberg, 2009). As such, the information age has gradually become the social age.

Symbolic Convergence and Tourism Social Media

The majority of scholarly contributions in tourism social media have focused on assisting practitioners to optimize online platforms or to describe the digital behavior of prospective individual tourists. These studies are dominated by mechanistic ontological frameworks, which take little notice of the inherently social nature of tourism consumption. Acknowledging the sociality of Web 2.0 communications, this chapter explores the potentials of an alternative analytical framework informed by symbolic convergence theory. The linkages between tourism social media, virtual communities, and symbolic convergence processes are illustrated by examples of postings taking place on the Facebook fan site of Roskilde festival. These examples highlight the significance of symbolic communities in shaping the visitor experience against the backdrop of contemporary consumer culture.

Popculture Tourism: A Research Manifesto

Tourism in the wake of films, literature, and music is gaining interest among academics and practitioners alike. Despite the significance of converging tourism and media production and popcultural consumption, theorizing in this field is weak. This chapter explores complex relationships among popcultural phenomena, destination image creation, and tourism consumption. By taking a broader social science approach, it revisits and connects research themes, such as symbolic consumption, negotiated representations, fans and fandom, technology mediation, and media convergence. The chapter concludes with an integrative model, or “popcultural placemaking loop,” which is qualified through six propositions.

Assessing the brand position of Danish kros

The brand image of traditional Danish inns (known as kros) was evaluated through their brand personality, brand snapshot and brand identity profile. These were established from in depth interviews with 26 customers at representative kros and 4 potential customers interviewed at other locations. The brand personality was an older man or woman, hard-working, warm and friendly, but unsophisticated and difficult for customers to identify with directly. The brand snapshot of a kro was an old traditional Danish half timbered building, decorated in an old fashioned style, much used by local country people. It would be cosy but smoky inside and would serve heavy traditional Danish fare. From these images and the brand identity profile it was clear that Danish kros had become a kind of museum-like repository of Danish values, which many would like to visit occasionally, but few espouse on a permanent basis. In addition, perception of kros as democratic institutions meant that customers did not expect to pay a premium for them. These findings are discussed and recommendations made for optimising the kro brand.

Social Media Co-creation Strategies: the 3Cs

This article explores how social media becomes a part of integrated marketing communications of festival organizations. The purpose of this article is to conceptualize the cocreation of festival experiences online by comparing managerial strategies and communicative patterns of three large Scandinavian music festivals: Storsjoyran, Way Out West (Sweden), and Roskilde Festival (Denmark). The theoretical point of departure is taken in the literature on consumer–producer cocreation, originating from recent conceptualizations of the service-dominant logic and a tribal perspective on consumption. Based on the empirical findings, we propose an analytical framework to improve our understanding of the management of social media communications, offering three distinct value cocreation strategies in a festival context.

Critical Digital Tourism Studies

Abstract This chapter analyzes the subject of critical digital tourism studies and envisions an agenda for technology research and education. Inspired by the insights of this book and the work of scholars in digital humanities and communication (Baym, 2010; Hayles, 2012), the study presents “embedded cognition” as a framework to comprehend the interdependencies between people’s actions and discourses, and technological affordances. It introduces the concept of “turistus digitalis,” discusses theories for conceptualizing society and technology relations, and examines the challenges of transdisciplinarity. This investigation contributes to increasing research reflexivity in understanding how tourism is enacted through digital worlds and how digital technologies evolve through tourism practices.