Tourism And Tourism Essay

Introduction

Due to emergence of social media, consumers now enjoy more control over how information is created, generated organized and shared. By widespread use of social media, consumers now participate in social networks which give them a platform for content creation and sharing them too. Consumers now communicate with one another and now enabled to build relationships with other consumers. Business communities are attracted to take note and keep track of everything done on social media so they can find market opportunities there as consumers are spending a lot of their time on internet and social media specifically.

Till now travel consumers heavily relied on travel journalism and traditional form of media to get information on their travel guide, but now internet is widely used and has taken over the role of information provider. As per the study published by in 2010 by Deloitte titled “Hospitality 2015” states that social media and new technology trends will be a key driver for the growth of the hospitality industry over the next five years. The study further states that with millions of consumers are now having internet access across the globe, that the study’s numbers are expected to increase by 50% in 2015 (Lee, 2010, p 7).

In order to better inform tourism marketing practices, knowledge about the role and importance of social media in travel information search is very much important considering the potential impact of social media on online tourism. Social media forces a rethink of traditional marketing methods. 81% of surveyed executives have expectation of substantial increase in their investment on social media projects and so reduce traditional marketing (Value of Social Media, 2010 as cited in Zhang et al., 2011)....

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... nature makes pre-purchase trial almost impossible (Mazzarol, Sweeney, & Soutar, 2007 as cited in O’Connor, 2010, p 758). Since people will be able to see positive EWOM as a recommendation for your property, EWOM can be used and managed for the purpose of revenue generation. EWOM provides an untainted and genuine consumer feedback. It also provide firms a service recovery mechanism through which they can reply, rebut or edit negative comments.

In summation, hospitality industry has to do better monitoting of information sources from the third-party and Web 2.0 sites such as makemytrip.com, yatra.com and tripadvisor.com should take advantage of them. Frequent updating is very much critical since freshness of information and valuable contents attracts customers visiting your site. Social media is not just another advertising channel, and this misconception must go.