Social mediation of tourism experiences via smartphones

Iis Tussyadiah and Daniel Fesenmaier, faculty members in Temple’s School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, report on a series of studies on the mediation on brokerage of tourism experiences using social media. Mediation of tourism experience is the act of providing information as well as opening or limiting access to desired experiences before, during, and after traveling. The emergence of social media, and the opportunities presented by their features, has generated a new set of mediators for tourist experiences. These studies delve into the mechanism of social mediation provided by tourists, suppliers and local residents at different stages of tourism experiences. For example:

• First-person stories on blogs and online videos act as a narrative transportation, providing access to foreign landscapes and socioscapes.
• Online videos provide mental pleasure to viewers by stimulating fantasies and daydreams (for tourists at the anticipatory stage of tourism) as well as bringing back past travel memories (for tourists at the recollection stage of tourism).
• Space categorization within a story in a blog post allows blog readers to have a cognitive construction of hypothetical travel scenarios including “rehearsals” of likely future travels.
• Tourists tend to follow recommendation from people they can relate to. The introduction of a blog writer as a personal character allows blog readers to access the picture of lived identities created through actions, attitudes and values.

For more information, contact Iis Tussyadiah and Daniel Fesenmaier in Temple’s School of Tourism and Hospitality Management.