‘I want to record and share my wonderful journey’: Chinese Millennials’ production and sharing of short-form travel videos on TikTok or Douyin

ABSTRACT

Seeking to understand how involvement with social media influences travel experiences, the current investigation explores the reasoning and social justifications of tourists’ engagement with travel videos on the short-form video sharing platform – TikTok. Using phenomenology, data consisted of semi-structured interviews with 12 tourists who had experiences consuming, producing, and sharing travel videos on TikTok. Findings suggest that consuming and creating TikTok touristic fantasies, hashtagging a #wonderfuljourney through sharing, and storing my meaningful life in a ‘public’ diary are three primary reasons for tourists’ engagement in TikTok travel videos. Results show that the daily use of TikTok, a visual storytelling platform, has extended to the tourism context, resulting in the eroding boundaries between tourism experiences and everyday life and contributing to an understanding of the ‘Leisure-Tourism’ Continuum in Web 2.0. It advocates DMOs to produce tourism videos based on tourist needs and the distinctness of the platform of TikTok.

KEYWORDS:

• TikTok
• tourism experience
• travel videos
• Chinese Millennials
• social media

Acknowledgements

The author(s) would like to thank study participants for their voluntary support in the research,as well as three annoymous reviewers for their helpful feedbacks on the earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).