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Marianna Sigala and Ulrike Gretzel (eds.):

Advances in social media for travel, tourism
and hospitality: new perspectives, practic....

Article in Information Technology & Tourism · January 2018

DOI: 10.1007/s40558-017-0102-7

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Suiwen Sharon Zou

Temple University
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0102-7

BOOK REVIEW

Marianna Sigala and Ulrike Gretzel (eds.): Advances

in social media for travel, tourism and hospitality: new
perspectives, practice and cases’’
ISBN 978-1-472-46920-5, Routledge, New York, NY, 2018, 330 pp.

Suiwen Sharon Zou1

Received: 4 December 2017 / Accepted: 19 December 2017

 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018

In the past decade, social media has tremendously changed the way travelers plan,
consume, and evaluate their travel and hospitality experience. Thus, it is imperative
for travel and hospitality firms to keep up with the latest trends and developments in
social media practices within the travel and hospitality context. Advances in Social
Media for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality: New Perspectives, Practice and Cases
provides a most up-to-date observation of the roles of social media in the tourism
and hospitality industry. From a management and marketing perspective, the book
covers four areas which are essential for readers to better understand the impacts as
well as the best practices of social media to attract and maintain consumers: (1) the
role of social media in the co-creation of tourism experience; (2) social media
application in tourism/hospitality marketing; (3) the influence of social media on
travelers’ behavior; and (4) social media analytics and big data.
The twenty chapters of this book are grouped into the abovementioned four parts,
with five chapters in each part. Part I, titled social media applications for co-creating
customer value and experience, provides a well-rounded account of the role of
social media in co-creating tourist experiences, which incorporates both the bright
role and the dark role of social media as well as both a theoretical foundation and
practical evidence. The first chapter gives an overview of the service-dominant logic
as a new perspective to look at tourism co-creation in the social media era. While
Chapter 1 mainly focuses on the positive side of social media, Chapter 2 critically
discussed the dark side of social media in tourism value co-creation. Instead of
value co-creation, the term ‘‘value co-destruction’’ denoted the negative outcome
resulted from the social media interaction. Specifically, this chapter uses a case of

& Suiwen Sharon Zou

sharonzou89@gmail.com
1
The US-Asia Center for Tourism and Hospitality Research, School of Sport, Tourism and
Hospitality Management, Temple University, 1810 N 13th St, Speakman Hall 362,
Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA

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 S. S. Zou

TripAdvisor to manifest the impacts of fake and inaccurate reviews on multiple

stakeholders. Emphasizing the shift from co-creation to user-driven creation,
Chapter 3 introduces the concept of tourist-driven innovation enabled by social
media. In addition to the illustration of the conceptual framework of the relationship
between social media and tourist-driven innovation, the chapter provides recom-
mendations for tourism enterprises how to gain benefits through managing this new
concept. Both Chapter 4 and 5 discuss the impacts of augmented reality (AR)
supplemented by interactive functions of social media on tourism experience.
Although the last two chapters are relatively less concentrated on social media,
these five chapters together thoroughly discuss the effects of social media in tourism
experience co-creation process from various lenses and perspectives.
Part II, titled ‘‘Marketing using social media applications and concepts’’, consists
of a collection of cases to illustrate various social media marketing approaches.
Supplementing with a case study of Visit Orlando DMO’s social media efforts,
Chapter 6 looks at the use of social media in destination marketing and contends
that social media has become an essential rather than an optional component in
destination marketing. Chapter 7 sketches a holistic picture of how social media has
shaped the Chinese culture as well as the travel behavior of Chinese free and
independent travelers (FIT). In Chapter 8, the concept of crowdsourcing is
introduced and defined as the act of outsourcing a task/job ‘‘through an open call to
a large group of people or a community (crowd or mass) through the internet’’. The
chapter outlines the pros and cons of crowdsourcing, various types of crowd-
sourcing processes, and the process of crowdsourcing implementation. Chapter 9 is
an empirical study focusing on the impacts of Facebook marketing on hotel groups’
customer engagement. It is worth mentioning that the study found that Facebook
fans are more likely to engage in hotel groups’ text-only posts than other types of
posts (photo, link or video). The last chapter of Part II reviews the influencer
marketing literature and practices in the social media context. In addition to a
comprehensive review of the topic, the chapter provides a list of influencer
marketing practices in the travel and tourism industry and calls for more research on
the tourism influencer marketing phenomenon.
The third part of the book, titled ‘‘Social Media: Travelers’ behavior’’,
underscores the disruptive power of social media in shaping tourist behavior in
this digital era. Chapter 11 defines electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) and
provides a critical literature review of e-WOM research in the field of tourism. As
an extension of Chapter 11, Chapter 12 is an empirical study examining the effects
of review platform policies on e-WOM. Results showed that verification of the hotel
stay did not result in more positive reviews and invitation emails did not encourage
consumers to leave a review, which were contrary to the proposed hypotheses and
suggests that online review behaviors are complicated. Chapter 13 uses online
opinions as a proxy of competitiveness, and by comparing reviews of traditional
hotels with Airbnb reviews, it reveals that Airbnb experiences are more positive
than conventional hotels. The next chapter discusses the interaction of sharing
economy and Generation Y’s travel consumption behavior. The last chapter of Part
III looks into the use of social media during travelers’ waiting time at airports. The

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Book Review ‘‘Advances in Social Media for Travel, Tourism…

study inspires the tourism industry with an innovative as well as viable idea of
utilizing social media to enhance airport waiting experience.
The final part of the book, named ‘‘Social media, knowledge management,
market research, business intelligence, social media analytics’’, depicts the state of
the art in social media data analytics in tourism and hospitality research and
practices. Chapter 16 outlines the landscape of sentiment analysis and emphasizes
the importance of sentiment analysis to tourism academics as well as practical
applications. Through a communication lens, Chapter 17 devises an analytical
method to interpret online travel reviews, providing an alternative social media
content analytical approach. Chapter 18 examines the credibility of social media
data and by comparing social media data and survey data, it concludes a consistency
between the results yielded from the two types of data. Chapter 19 provides
destination marketing organizations with a methodology to extract valuable insights
and generate business knowledge, and the very last chapter explores the virtual
community formation among destination marketing organization’s Twitter
followers.
Overall, the edited book characterizes the tourism industry in the digital era with
the latest trend in social media, spiced with cutting-edge empirical studies. Although
some of the chapters are less social media topic-oriented than other chapters, the
book addresses the most important topics related to social media research and
marketing pracitces in the tourism industry. The content of the book is particularly
suitable for tourism scholars who are interested in social media research as well as
tourism practitioners who use social media as an essential marketing tool.

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