Ulrike Gretzel

University of Southern California | USC · Communication and Journalism

Technological advances continue to significantly change tourist information search behaviour. This paper revisits online tourist information search strategies by reconceptualising them as a combination of goals, approaches and online sources. Based on pre-trip and post-trip interviews and trip planning diaries, the paper investigates how tourists s...

Social media is often used as an information hub when travelers plan their trips (Dwityas & Briandana, 2017). Given that most social media content is user-generated, consumers tend to trust and be more influenced by this type of information than by commercial sources (Apaolaza et al., 2021). Therefore, social media can influence other travelers’ be...

Despite increasing attention to technology development and its impact on travel information search, research about information search behaviours across multiple devices (i.e., smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktop computers) has received limited attention. Guided by technology affordance theory, this paper examines the link between device use...

Themes direct the symbolic consumption of tourism. Most tourism research argues for symbolic association to represent cognitive meaning-making. Responding to the call for an affective turn in tourism studies, we argue for symbolic consumption of themes to be both affective and cognitive through the concept of ‘feeling’. We draw from our five-year l...

This encyclopedia entry provides a definition of influence, describes sources of influence, and discusses the concept in relation to contemporary phenomena such as social media influencers.

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the indus...

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the indus...

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the indus...

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the indus...

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the indus...

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the indus...

Since the publication of the ground-breaking first edition, there has been an exponential growth in research and literature about the digital world and its enormous potential benefits and threats. Fully revised and updated, this new edition brings together an expertly curated and authoritative overview of the impact and emerging horizons of digital...

Digital consumption increases consumer mobility and fuels desire. With increasing emotional and time investments in digital consumption practices, heightened mobility and desire can turn into hypermobility and obsession. This chapter highlights five cases in which hypermobility and obsession create opportunities and needs for perpetual travel, name...

Destination influencer marketing can be defined as the strategy employed by tourist destinations to persuade online audiences in the desired direction by using the power of social media influencers (SMIs). This strategy is implemented on social media platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) and relies on one or several influencers as...

Aims and scope of this special issue: Tourists represent one of the most diverse types of consumers, including a large group of people with disabilities. Many of them frequently face physical, sensory, cognitive, or cultural barriers in service provision and delivery. These barriers may occur in any of the typical tourist experience phases - inspi...

Many technologically driven societies currently experience a "pandemic of loneliness". The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to conceptualize loneliness as a persistent and widespread issue among consumers that has been amplified by the CO-VID-19 pandemic and increasingly spills over into the travel and tourism domain. This issue creates many chal...

Social media-based visual strategies are quintessential elements of tourism and social media marketing; yet, very little is known about how firms formulate and implement such strategies in a technologically advanced and consumer-driven communication context. Drawing on rhetorical structure theory, and marketing, tourism and social media marketing l...

The crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the entire tourism system, including communication and marketing practices. Of these practices, in recent years influencer marketing has been one of the more successful strategies for both destinations and tourism businesses. This research investigates the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on...

The smartphone has become an indispensable travel companion for contemporary tourists. However, how smartphone use during the trip changes the travel context and related travel decision-making is still unclear. By tracing the in-situ decision-making processes in a real-world setting, this empirical study develops a deep understanding of the role of...

Con anterioridad a la crisis causada por la COVID-19, y con expectativas de volver a la misma situación, muchos destinos turísticos se han enfrentado en los últimos años a una demanda masiva que ha tensionado sus territorios y ha generado una ampla variedad de problemáticas asociadas al overtourism. Entre los factores desencadenantes de esta presió...

Tourists are increasingly using drones on vacation, but how they use them and the nature of the videos that they produce are not well understood. Conceptual advances in the study of tourist videography have produced a new model of these practices which is applied here to explain the nature of tourist videography with drones. An international sample...

Smart tourism development has been adopted by destinations around the world to strengthen their long-term competitiveness in light of rapid technological, societal and environmental change. Destination management organizations (DMOs) are generally endowed with smart tourism governance at the destination-level and typically see it as a great opportu...

Tourism is highly dependent on technological solutions. Smart technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, are creating an important driving force for travel, hospitality, and leisure (THL) during the pandemic and beyond, paving the way for new business models, new customer touchpoints, and new value (co-)creation opportunities....

In the not-so-distant past, genealogists and family history hobbyists had to lug around heavy boxes, documents, and copious notes and references as they travelled to discover their family roots. Technological advances in mobile devices and applications have created efficiencies and opened paths of exploration that facilitate researching genealogica...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to apply institutional theory to demonstrate if and how mimetic, coercive and normative pressures shape technology adoption in hotels and lead to institutional isomorphism. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a qualitative approach involving interviews with managers representing 20 different hotels. A th...

Women in STEM are underrepresented and face challenges in balancing work and family. Therefore, mentoring is an important career intervention that focuses on individual’s well-being and professional career. This study introduces a voluntary, flexible, context-sensitive and informal peer-based mentoring model. Twenty-six female STEM professors from...

Overtourism is a pressing issue for tourism destinations, including those whose attractiveness and experiential offerings are based on natural resources. The relationship between overtourism and technology is complicated, but technological solutions are generally seen as critical for overcoming or at least mitigating overtourism and its negative co...

To better understand and predict tourism demand, we introduce the concept of vacation dedication to the tourism literature. Vacation dedication is a form of enthusiasm for and devotion to going on vacation. It is an enduring urge to go on vacation that is so strong that it persists in spite of external constraints. We empirically test its links to...

Smart tourism emerges from the application of advanced technologies in the context of destinations, most often cities. It borrows extensively from smart city development ideas but its conceptualization as well as realization have been kept separate from broader smart city initiatives. This paper argues that such a separation makes little sense in a...

This special issue of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism focuses on the challenges and opportunities ICT uses or practices create for well-being in tourism contexts. This special issue aims, on one hand, to elaborate on ICTs and their potential negative influence on tourism experiences and overall well-being. On the other hand, it seek...

Digital well-being has become a popular theme within a public discourse that increasingly attracts consumers, businesses, government institutions and technology providers who all face challenges in their technology-driven existence. However, there have been no attempts to create a comprehensive framework for a general understanding of digital well-...

This chapter draws from a commercial netnography we conducted to explore Chinese cosmetics consumers' changing notions of female beauty. Specifically, we were tasked with informing the new product development efforts of ArtCosmetics, an Italian B2B contract manufacturer operating in the global cosmetics market. We use the project to discuss how we...

Themes direct the symbolic consumption of tourism. Most tourism research argues for symbolic association to represent cognitive meaning-making. Responding to the call for an affective turn in tourism studies, we argue for symbolic consumption of themes to be both affective and cognitive through the concept of ‘feeling’. We draw from our five-year l...

Smart tourism efforts emphasize the use of ICT in the form of intelligent systems to achieve a variety of tourism development goals. They require substantial infrastructure investments as well as mindset-shifts in terms of tourism governance. This chapter reflects on the principles of smart tourism development, charts its conceptual and practical e...

Ongoing travel information search remains under-examined in general, and specifically in terms of social media use. Understanding how visual social media platforms inspire travel dreams is increasingly pertinent as visual contents gain in importance. This is especially relevant when travel is restricted, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pinter...

As a contribution to a knowledge and understanding of tourism development, this book: (i) comprises reflective essays written by internationally-ranked scholars and tourism consultants with extensive experience, particularly in developing countries; (ii) considers extant themes, issues and challenges related to tourism and development; and (iii) of...

This chapter draws from a commercial netnography we conducted to explore Chinese cosmetics consumers’ changing notions of female beauty. Specifically, we were tasked with informing the new product development efforts of ArtCosmetics, an Italian B2B contract manufacturer operating in the global cosmetics market. We use the project to discuss how we...

Netnography can usefully be applied to the context of policy advocacy and regulatory change. In this chapter, we overview a netnography project we undertook with the Washington, DC-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a non-profit advocacy group. We conducted a multi-language, multi-platform netnographic investigation in 10 countries with 11 resea...

The distinction between “traditional” travel businesses and travel tech companies has remained steady for years due to knowledge, resource and financial reasons, leading them to operate in separate bubbles. The massive damages caused by COVID-19 for both sides of the industry pose a unique opportunity for them to ditch the old transactional working...

Building on the momentum of Industry 4.0 developments in production and manufacturing, the tourism-specific concept of Tourism 4.0 currently fuels visions of similar technology-based transformations towards highly interconnected and phygital systems in the tourism industry. There is an implicit assumption that the technological innovations of Touri...

International heritage tourism is the backbone of Iranian tourism. To positively influence the country’s destination image and attract more international tourists, world heritage sites (WHSs) need to be present on social media. This paper investigates the representation of Iranian WHSs on social media based on a content analysis of WHS-related Face...

UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) are known to add value to destinations. While the diverse impacts of WHS status have been investigated in relation to sustainable tourism development in various contexts, social justice perspectives remain poorly developed in the literature. We used netnographic research on social media supplemented with semi-struc...

Purpose This paper aims to bridge micro-entrepreneurship, sharing economy and community-based tourism (CBT) literature by analyzing the specific ways in which technological platforms mitigate risks and create opportunities that benefit local communities. Design/methodology/approach Six online platforms (two local and four international) used by to...

Smart tourism development has received tremendous attention worldwide, but relevant literature remains largely focused on the technological aspects of achieving the greater economic growth and efficiency through innovation, mobility, inclusion and environmental sustainability the smart paradigm promises. While well-being and experience enhancement...

This viewpoint article argues that the impacts of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 call for transformative e-Tourism research. We are at a crossroads where one road takes us to e-Tourism as it was before the crisis, whereas the other holds the potential to transform e-Tourism. To realize this potential, e-Tourism research needs to challenge existing...

Themed routes are powerful regional development and marketing tools that attract tourists around the world. India has committed to developing multiple themed routes through the Swadesh Darshan Scheme. Applying a conceptual framework of themed route marketing developed on the basis of collaboration in destination marketing and branding literature, t...

Expanding on long-term, in-depth research carried out in partnership with the non-profit organization, Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids (CTFK), we conducted a 10-country netnography concerning the use of branded events and social media to market tobacco brands to young people. Our study revealed how youth culture and activist discourse are subverted...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce e-mindfulness as a tourism trend. Mindfulness meditation is becoming increasingly mainstream, which is reflected in a rapidly growing number of related technology applications. Such technology-assisted mindfulness is typically referred to as e-mindfulness. The e-mindfulness trend creates opportuniti...

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) devices has been recognised as a significant component of travel experiences. However, the portrayal of internet connectivity as a binary entity within literature has overlooked the significant experiential breadth that exists within the state of being connected. Drawing on the contexts of r...

Influencer marketing has impacted all industries, including travel and tourism. Many Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) are lever- aging the influence of online personalities for diverse purposes, including attracting visitors to their destinations. This paper sheds light on the use of social media influencers by DMOs, reveals the inner dy...

This handbook provides an authoritative and truly comprehensive overview both of the diverse applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within the travel and tourism industry and of e-tourism as a field of scientific inquiry that has grown and matured beyond recognition. Leading experts from around the world describe cutting-...

Travel and tourism is a domain ripe for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) because it is information-intense on both the demand and the supply-side. And not only does tourism as an activity need and produce lots of data, the data is extremely dynamic, notoriously unstructured and hugely decentralized. On the personal level, the data is...

Purpose The research investigates the presence of technology ideologies in consumer discourse on tourism and hospitality robots. Design/methodology/approach Using a netnographic approach, the research involved immersion in online discourses and collection of consumer posts from a variety of social media platforms. Data was subjected to a thematic...

This research aimed to examine technology practices through an Institutional Theory perspective focused on isomorphism. Hotel managers in Natal (Northeast Brazil) were interviewed about their ICT adoption and use. The results painted certain technology as essential for hotels and revealed isomorphic tendencies in their use. The results also highlig...

Purpose Smart tourism is a destination management approach that requires the buy-in of a myriad of stakeholders. Its many audiences and complexity demand the creation of meaningful brands to effectively position and communicate smart tourism initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to explore how smart tourism branding strategies have been impleme...

To better understand and predict tourism demand, we introduce the concept of vacation dedication to the tourism literature. Vacation dedication is a form of enthusiasm for and devotion to going on vacation. It is an enduring urge to go on a vacation that is so strong that it persists in spite of external constraints. We empirically test its links t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of travel information search literature over the past 75 years to outline research needs for the upcoming decades. Design/methodology/approach This paper conducts a literature review based on the descriptive textual analysis of article abstracts from a sample of representative tourism j...

Purpose This paper aims to provide a perspective on food waste by tourists and tourist households, now and in the future. Design/methodology/approach This is a perspective article that summarizes contemporary thinking about food waste and conceptualizes food waste specifically for tourist household settings. Findings In tourism, food is more than...

Food, an emerging focus in the circular economy literature, plays an important but contradictory role while on holiday with positive personal experiences and negative sustainability consequences. Food waste, despite major and ongoing strides in sustainability research, remains an under-researched area across tourism, particularly by tourist househo...

Purpose Provides a comprehensive review of research on robotics in travel, tourism and hospitality. Identifies research gaps and directions for future research. Design/methodology/approach Analyzes 131 publications published during 1993-2019 identified via Scopus, Web of Science, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Google Scholar. This includes quantit...

Social media influence travel and tourism in many ways, and it is therefore natural to assume they also play a role in overtourism. This chapter systematically analyzes the nature of social media and their resulting impacts on a number of tourism-related phenomena of relevance to the overtourism issue. Specifically, it highlights the role of social...

Trails with a gastronomic theme present a popular tool for regional tourism development as they market destinations/products/experiences in a gastronomy-scape or touristic terroir. They represent networks or clusters of attractions/destinations unified under a distinct gastronomic theme such as beer, wine, or cheese. Most research addressing gastr...

Humanoid robots should play an increasing role in hospitality and tourism services. Anthropomorphic – human like – characteristics seem critical component to consumers accepting robotic service (rService). This conceptual manuscript advances rService research by drawing on services marketing, Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and the Uncanny Valley The...

Academic researchers were provided with an additional forum to exchange knowledge, research and agendas on the critical study of urban tourism and tourism cities with the emergence of the International Journal of Tourism Cities in 2015. Its Theme editors were invited to provide their insights on future research agendas in urban tourism research. Th...

The study examines the role played by submission devices (mobile vs. desktop) in online travel reviewing behaviour. We analyse over 1.2 million online reviews from Booking.com and detect the presence and distinctive features of online reviews submitted by mobile devices. Our findings indicate that 1) the share of online reviews submitted by mobile...

Information and communication technologies enable the emergence of new digital lifestyles that are characterized by high mobility. This paper explores #vanlife as an emerging phenomenon that inspires a hyper-mobile life on the road. It connects it to digital nomadism and compares and contrasts it to RVing/camping. Using the visual components and ha...

Destinations around the world are rolling out smart tourism initiatives to increase their competitiveness and to support their sustainability goals. However, whether smart tourism development can also help them build resilience is a question that currently lacks an answer. This paper links the two concepts of smart destinations and destination resi...

There is growing interest in developing smart tourism beyond individual smart destinations, but research and practice currently do not supply the necessary conceptualizations that could inform smart tourism development at a regional level. This paper argues that this is the case because of smart tourism’s roots in smart city ideas and literature. I...

Acknowledging the significant advancement of social media, the role and impact of social media has been widely discussed in tourism research. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain an overview of the knowledge produced in relation to the topic. Review studies provide such overviews to guide future research efforts. This study r...

This presentation explores whether and how smart tourism can provide better, more active experiences for senior tourists.

Conceptualizing selfie-taking and posting as identity work, this chapter explores selfies taken while travelling. Using a netnographic research approach, it investigates what travel selfies posted on Instagram depict and to what extent they support the travellers' and social media users' quest for the extraordinary. Diving deep into the data but al...

Introduction to Part 3 of Advances in Social Media for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality

Social media require a marketing rhetoric that embraces emerging language use and shifting communication norms. Emojis have become quintessential elements of social media communication; yet, their role in supporting persuasion attempts has not been systematically analysed. Drawing on general rhetoric literature, this paper dissects, portrays and la...

Social media-based visual strategies are quintessential elements of tourism and social media marketing; yet, very little is known about how firms formulate and implement such strategies in a technologically advanced and consumer-driven communication context. Drawing on rhetorical structure theory, and marketing, tourism and social media marketing l...

Knowledge construction is a crucial factor in the development of any field of study. While empirical papers sustain knowledge development in a field, systematic analysis of the literature and critiques of influential papers are core components of high-level knowledge construction. The aim of this paper is to critically evaluate Fodness and Murray’s...

Smart tourism development has become a major focus for many destinations across the world, and particularly in Asia, as it promises competitive advantages by increasing efficiency, fostering sustainability, and enhancing tourism experiences. However, smart tourism development is complex and many destinations are struggling to successfully implement...