Online tourism experiences: exploring digital and human dimensions in in-remote destination visits

ABSTRACT

Fully online tourist experiences remain a largely unexplored area of inquiry, as a valuable and meaningful traveling modality per se, beyond any connection with conventional tourism. This explorative study aims to advance knowledge on the role of human and technology dimensions in shaping the online tourist experience during the pandemic. A sample of 9,300 Airbnb Online Experience reviews of thirty-four online destination experiences was analyzed. A typology of four fully online tourism experiences is presented, such as individual escape and personalized learning, meeting the destination, meeting the host and social bonding. The research reveals the dynamic evolution of the fully online tourist experience during the pandemic, highlighting the strengthening role of the human dimension and the human-to-human interaction, despite the digital mediation of the in-remote destination visit. Avenues for destination management and marketing research and practice spring from the analysis of fully online tourist experiences as a form of virtual tourism.

完全在线的旅游体验仍然是一个很大程度上未被探索的领域, 作为一种有价值和有意义的旅游方式, 超越了传统旅游的任何联系. 这项探索性研究旨在增进对人类和技术维度在大流行期间塑造在线旅游体验中的作用的认识. 对34个在线目的地体验的9300个Airbnb在线体验评论样本进行了分析. 介绍了四种完全在线旅游体验的类型, 如个人逃生和个性化学习、与目的地见面、与主人见面和社会联系. 这项研究揭示了疫情期间完全在线旅游体验的动态演变, 突出了人的层面和人与人的互动的强化作用, 尽管远程目的地访问是数字媒介. 目的地管理和营销研究与实践的途径来源于对作为虚拟旅游形式的完全在线旅游体验的分析.

 

KEYWORDS:

• Online tourism experience
• online destination experience
• virtual tourism
• human centricity
• Airbnb Online experience
• covid-19 pandemic

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Lexicalization, lemmatization, normalization, segmentation, and deletion of empty forms were started as automatic preparatory and cleaning procedures. The bag of words procedure was maintained with a threshold cut to 50 occurrences.