Travel vlogging practice and its impacts on tourist experiences

ABSTRACT

Travel vlogging is gaining popularity and studying the practice of travel vlogging can provide insights into tourist behaviour, communication, and management. The notion of practice was adopted as the theoretical base and the analytical framework. A qualitative approach was employed, including interviews with 12 strategically sampled vlogger tourists and analysis of their vlog productions. The findings suggested that travel vlogging is a practice bundle constructed by four sequential practices; designing, filming, editing, and posting. Through a collaborative relationship, the four practices achieve the shared meanings of self-concept expressions, a sense of documentation and ritual, and pleasures in vlogging. Moreover, travel vlogging affects tourist experiences; it creates a self-other divide, mediates the experiences of the ‘self’, and moderates the experiences of the ‘others’. Such impacts vary across the dimensions of travel stages, materiality, and engagement. Theoretically, the study offers fresh insights into the practice of vlogging and the creation of travel vlog content; pragmatically, understandings and implications for quality experiences of vlogger tourists are addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Travel vlog
• vlogging
• tourist videography
• practice
• self-concept

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their constructive comments that helped improve the paper. We are grateful to Juyun Li, Shan Yi, Wenkai Shun, Zhicheng Liu and Jiecheng Gao for their help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

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