Tourist gaze, tourist destination images and extended tourist destination experiences: Description and point of view in community travelogs

Visual perception is key to defining tourist destination image and experience, has a major part in framing the tourist gaze, and motivates the distinctive bias towards procedural place descriptions in traditional paper guidebooks. Research in the sociology of tourism and in tourist marketing and management, however, points to the complex nature of tourist gaze, tourist destination image and tourist destination experiences as resulting from the intersection of social values and perception (Urry/Larsen 32012) in geographical places that are also sites for activities and services (Ricci/Werthner 2002). Constructing tourist gaze and the tourist destination experience thus draws on a diverse range of common and unique, tangible and intangible attributes and related holistic imagery (Echtner/Ritchie 2003). Given the proliferation of ICTs and the more active role now played by tourists in the construction of technologically mediated travel experiences, it is the purpose of this paper to concentrate on travelogs as ‘word-of-mouth’ (Murphy/Moscardo/Benckendorff 2007) and a non-promotional genre that may influence travel decisions and take part in the (co-)creation of tourist gaze and tourist destination experience. My main goal is to discuss the role of description, perceptual and attitudinal point of view in (co-)creating travel experiences. To this end, I carry out a corpus-assisted qualitative investigation into a small corpus of American English travel blogs (VirTra – EN Blog: 90 posts, 180,000 running words), mainly posted on virtual community websites and online travel guides and adopt an integrated framework of analysis that bringing together insights from research in Computer-Mediated Communication (e.g. Herring et al. 2005; Puschmann 2009; Herring 2013; Puschmann 2013), in tourism marketing (e.g. Neuhofer/Buhalis/Ladkin 2012) and notions from studies on text types (Werlich 1976; Smith 2003; Merlini Barbaresi 2009) and attitudinal point of view (Thompson/Hunston 2001). Destinations are defined as “a complex amalgam of tourism products and services” (Neuhofer/Buhalis/Ladkin 2012), geographical entities and sites for activities and services. I have thus suggested that readers use and compare information from what they deem credible blog posts to get ideas or narrow down choices at the beginning of the virtual pre-travel phase. What this means for the analysis is that procedural place descriptions do not define travelogs and, most importantly, description, perceptual and attitudinal point of view are Background. Instead, travelogs are better seen as subjective narratives that show extreme variance as regards both the relation of subjective narratives to other types (primarily description), and the combination of speech acts such as narrating, describing, characterizing and evaluating in comments and narratives. Perceptual, attitudinal, and social images are all key to shaping and reinforcing gaze as well as creating unique and attractive destinations based on popular clichés and stereotypes. Topic-centric publishing appears to establish and demonstrate the writer’s credibility and expertise, which goes pairs with backgrounding of attitudinal point of view.