Social Media and Tourism

This book explores how digital platforms are transforming the tourism landscape, influencing how destinations are perceived, experienced, promoted, and discussed. The chapters examine the powerful role of social media—from Instagram images and user-generated content to hashtags, online advocacy campaigns, and AI-driven image analysis—in shaping contemporary travel behaviour and destination management.Part I, Social Media Content, Perception, and Branding, examines how online content influences destination image, tourist perceptions, visitor behaviour, and branding strategies across cultural, natural, and culinary tourism contexts. Part II, Social Media Activism and Advocacy, investigates the growing role of digital platforms in encouraging ethical consumption, tourism boycotts, disaster communication, event advocacy, and social engagement, demonstrating how online communities can transform values into collective action. Part III, Social Media Influence on Tourist Behaviour and Destination Choice, explores how social media communications, online networks, personality traits, and emerging technologies shape destination choice, brand switching, travel intentions, and content-sharing behaviours.Bringing together cutting-edge research from diverse tourism settings around the world, this volume offers an integrated and accessible overview of the dynamic relationship between social media and tourism. It provides valuable insights for students, researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners seeking to understand how digital technologies continue to redefine tourism experiences, destination competitiveness, and traveler decision-making in the twenty-first century.The chapters in this book were originally published in Tourism Recreation Research.

• Introduction: Social Media and Tourism: An Integrated Perspective 1. Exploring tourist perceptions of urban sacred forest landscapes through spatial and content analysis of social media data: a case study of Meiji Jingu shrine, Tokyo 2. Tourism and mental disorder: bibliometric and social media analysis and future avenues for research 3. Using social media to discover unwanted behaviours displayed by visitors to nature parks: comparisons of nationally and privately owned parks in the Greater Kruger National Park, South Africa 4. Culinary destination consumer-based brand equity: exploring the influence of tourist gaze in relation to FoodPorn on social media. 5. Behind the hashtags: exploring tourists’ motivations in a social media-centred boycott campaign 6. From values to actions, understanding millennials’ tourism Boycotts through social media activism 7. Framing theory insights: the co-existence of frame coupling and frame mirroring in social media and online news about a disaster-affected destination 8. From attendance to advocacy: examining technological and value drivers of event experience sharing on social media 9. Social structure of social media research in tourism and hospitality. Tourism Recreation Research 10. Social media influence on tourists’ destination choice: importance of context 11. The effect of social media communications on travellers’ brand switching intention: an Ecotel’s perspective 12. Scrolling social media: can it trigger intentions to visit man-made tourism destinations? 13. Exploring the role of personality traits and goal-framing in visitors’ social media sharing intention at a tourism exhibition: trait activation theory perspective 14. Deep learning-based research on cultural symbols in few-shot destination social media images