Yeongbae Choe

Use of social media across the trip experience: An application of latent transition analysis

ABSTRACT Recent advanced technologies have enabled travelers to communicate, interact, and form relationships with destinations, businesses, and other travelers through social media. However, the nature/patterns of use of social media by travelers varies substantially between travelers and across the trip experience (e.g. pre-, during, and post-trip); consequently, travelers develop their own idiosyncratic strategies (i.e. media repertoires) for information searching, communicating, and storing memories. There are four distinct and dominant repertoires of social media use across the three stages of the trip experience. As such, the findings clearly indicate that destination marketers should target the respective groups very differently.

The Quantified Traveler: Implications for Smart Tourism Development

This chapter provides a foundation for developing practical applications of wearable devices and related technologies for the tourism industry. It is posited that technologies related to the quantified self perfectly match the needs of context-relevant information and therefore offers a number of opportunities to shape tourism experiences. As such, the information collected through this technology enables tourism destinations to understand not only each individual traveler, but also the collective market in much greater detail, and consequently enables them to design much more compelling and efficient tourism services.

Trip budget and destination advertising response.

Advertising is one of the most important tools for destination marketing organizations. As such, many advertising effectiveness studies have been conducted which focus on the direct consequences of destination advertising. However, little of this research has examined the linkages between responses targeting certain aspects of the trip (e.g., hotel accommodation, attractions visited, etc.) and changes in trip budget as defined by the length of stay and money spent. The results of this study confirm that changes in trip budget and response to the destination advertising are related and they both impact total trip expenditures, but their impacts vary based on the nature of the trip. These relationships provide important implications for the understanding and design of destination advertising programs.

Measuring Destination Marketing: Comparing Four Models of Advertising Conversion

Conversion studies are a standard technique by which marketers evaluate advertisement effectiveness. A review of the tourism literature finds that advertising conversion studies use a number of metrics that have evolved to include most aspects of visitor decisions; however, this literature also indicates that there are few comparative studies focusing on the variability of response. The overall goal of this study is to identify and compare estimates of impact on visitor expenditures using four different approaches ranging from traditional advertising models (i.e., gross conversion rate and net conversion rate) to a more comprehensive facets-based destination advertisement response (DAR) model. The various models result in a huge range of impact estimates and it is concluded that the DAR model offers, both theoretically and practically, a powerful framework for evaluating advertising response in that it incorporates the possibility that destination advertising affects decisions related to a range of trip-related activities.

Twenty-Five Years Past Vogt: Assessing the Changing Information Needs of American Travellers

Travel behaviour has changed considerably over the past 25 years as the internet, social media and mobile systems have become integrated into our everyday lives. In particular, the nature and extent of information search is one of the most important aspects of travel behaviour effected by these advancements. This study assesses the impacts of these technologies on travellers’ information needs by comparing the results of studies by Vogt and her colleagues conducted before the advent of the internet and a comparable study conducted recently. The results of this study indicate that functional information is still most important, but the importance of all other information needs (i.e., hedonic, innovation, experiential, and sign) increased significantly as compared to the pre-internet era. Functional information was found to be more important before the trip than during the trip. Innovation and hedonic information were more important during the trip compared to before the trip. In the sign information construct, “social” stands out as being important compared to advisory or symbolic. The theoretic and practical implications are discussed as this study demonstrates the ways travellers search for and use information continues to evolve as the internet becomes more fully integrated into our daily lives.