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The Affects of Social Networking on Youth Travellers Vacation Desires

The Affects of Social Networking on Youth Travellers Vacation Desires
Author: Anastasia Stratigou
1 Commentries
This conference paper investigates how travel related photographs posted on social networking sites influence the travel motivations of young tourists who are members of such sites.

Keywords; Youth Tourism, Social Networking, Travel Photography

The growing tourism industry and rise of e-commerce at present provides consumers with more opportunities and reasons to travel than ever before. Specifically the technology savvy, youth tourism market has witnessed a rise in the usage of the internet to access instant information, whilst exploring possible travel opportunities (Huang & Petrick, 2010). Furthermore, recent trends in technology have observed the emergence of social networking sites such as MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter. Such websites encourage users to share information on what they are doing, upload pictures of what they have been up to, and post blog entries in order to share their interests and activities with other users.

As the most recent entrant of the consumer market, young travellers possess significant spending power due to the size of the consumer segment (Huang & Petrick, 2010). Youth tourism; the travel carried out by young people aged between 15 and 25, (WTO, 2008), is a growing market, and has been recognised as an important and diverse tourism market. The WTO (2008) estimates that of all the trips carried out by the youth market approximately 70% are stimulated by an aspiration to explore, work or study abroad and that youth travel forms over 20% of the international tourist arrivals each year.

The advancements in technology have had a significant impact on ICT and have consequently instigated the emergence of numerous user generated sites such as travel forums and social networks, which have transformed the way in which people gather information regarding travel. Urry (2002) reflects on how tourism is used to shape life experiences and he concentrates on how mass consumption of tourism emerged at roughly the same time as photography. Online photo-sharing is used as a major focal point on social networks and allows users of the site to disclose their travelling experiences and discuss the encounter with other members, through the continuous engagement of an image, photo-sharing provides the audience with the ability to gain key information and advice in relation to places that they may wish to visit.

Social networking sites are highly consumed by younger generations while they keep their friends up to date with what they are doing and mobile applications have made it easier for users to continually update their profiles with real time comments and images. The freedom of youth travel and the increasing market for the specialised form of tourism has developed along with the growth of sites such as MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter. While young travellers persist in the participation of new experiences, such as back-packing, volunteer tourism and working abroad, the uploading of photographs maintaining their travel blogs influences the travel of the audience who follow the posts.

It is understood that travel and photography go hand-in-hand as photography is consistently used to document travel experiences, (Urry, 2002). Photo-sharing has become a much less private activity, as the online audience who are now able to access images is considerable, in contrast to the traditional close friends and relatives who would be the main audience of holiday photographs. The retrieval of images by numerous spectators allows many diverse opinions to merge and be considered however each individual viewer will still take away a unique denotation. Online photo-sharing encourages both past tourists of the pictured destination to think about their travel experiences in addition to potential tourists to consider the destination as a future travel possibility.

Photo-sharing of experiences is particularly popular on social networks and in a study carried out for the purpose of this paper 92% of 50 respondents agreed that not only do they view the images uploaded of their friends travel experiences, but 86% of the 50 users questioned, additionally agreed that they are often influenced in carrying out further research of a destination that they find attractive from their friends shared pictures. The study did however reveal that only 8% of respondents had previously consumed a destination due to their raised awareness from images posted over a social networking site, therefore suggesting that although shared images have an influence of gathering more information relating to a destination, photo-sharing does not necessarily lead to the generated consumption of a destination.

References

Huang, Y. C., & Petrick, J. F. (2010). Generation Y's Travel Behaviours: a Comparison with Baby Boomers and Generation X. In P. Benckendorff, G. Moscardo, & D. Pendergast, Tourism and Generation Y (pp. 27-37). Wallingford: CAB International.

Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage.

WTO. (2008). Youth Travel Matters: Understanding the Global Phenomenon of Youth Travel. Madrid: World Tourism Organization.
Online Travel photo-sharing and Web 2.0 technology
Author: Ali Abdi dahir
This paper has identify well the magnitude, with which the World Wide Web has grown, means that travel-related information and services allow people across the globe to plan their trips online. It is easy to contemplate this concept when you separate the process of planning a trip into two stages. This can be seen as stage (1) the person will be able to choose a trip based on information and recommendations sourced from other tourists or programmes found online that allow them to narrow down and plan thoroughly their trip. The second stage is a simple way where tourists can gather information on the characteristics of a destination; this simply means gaining knowledge of local landmarks or points of interest. In doing this it allows the tourist to plan a detailed route for their proposed trip. When planning a trip both stages can be considered crucial, for it is important a tourist is fully aware of the destination‟s credentials. By following these stages it allows for successful future route planning.

If the stages above are to be taken literally, it is important we consider other external factors alongside them. Essentially the stages suggest that a destinations review should be able to identify the popular landmarks within the destination, however importantly with this comes the need to further explain what the destination has to offer, other than just explaining landmarks they can visit. This means informing tourists of other features (e.g. rainforest, ocean) or indeed activities (e.g. dive, surf). However with this should come information in the form of vivid descriptions to give them a deeper understanding. Furthermore visual descriptions will aid their choice, because this can allow them to fully comprehend their future trip and experience a virtual tour before they visit the chosen destination. (Yanwei Pang a, Qiang Hao a, Yuan Yuan b, Tanji Hu a, Rui Cai c, Lei Zhang, 2010)

Furthermore, today User-generated content (UGC) such as online social media has rocketed in recent years. This sector can currently be seen as one of the fastest growing on the entire web. Through the use of social media people are able to share thoughts and opinions (i.e blogger, twitter and Wikipedia), photo and video sharing (i.e. flickr and YouTube) with more ease than they ever have been able to do before. These various social media segments allow individual users to search and compose content personal and relevant to them.

References

Huang, Y. C., & Petrick, J. F. (2010). Generation Y's Travel Behaviours: a Comparison with Baby Boomers and Generation X. In P. Benckendorff, G. Moscardo, & D. Pendergast, Tourism and Generation Y (pp. 27-37). Wallingford: CAB International.

Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage.