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Even if the relationship between travel bloggers and followers has implications for tourists’ decision-making process, the literature does not individuate the main determinants of this relationship. This paper aims to study the drivers and motivations to follow travel bloggers and the main consequences. Moreover, the paper seeks to highlight the metamorphosis of travel bloggers and their role in the tourism industry.

A systematic literature review was used, and 76 papers were selected. A thematic map of the literature and a summary of key findings are proposed.

Although authenticity is the main trigger for following travel bloggers, other factors (e.g. transparency and credibility), if lacking, can erode the relationship with followers. Results demonstrate that hygiene factors are important but that the relationship with followers can be compromised if motivational factors are lacking. Loyalty and the continued use of travel blogs are the main consequences of a relationship based on trust, credibility and engagement.

Tourism and hospitality managers must define sophisticated segmentation procedures to select the right travel blogger with which to engage for destination promotions. Travel bloggers must clearly define the role that they want to have in the market if they are to instill loyalty in their followers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that attempts to identify the pillars of the follower–travel blogger relationship in the tourism and hospitality literature.

The purpose of this study is to propose a model investigating the effectiveness of travel blogs as a relationship marketing tool. Specifically, the mediating role of online relationship quality (RQ) dimensions between the attributes of blogs and e-loyalty is modeled. Furthermore, the study investigates the e-loyalty to travel blogs in explaining the reader’s intention to purchase from its online retailer.

The subjects of this study were blog readers who had travel blog usage experiences. The online survey was conducted by one of the major portal Web sites in Taiwan. There were 288 usable responses obtained in total. The structural equation modeling approach was used to estimate the research model.

The research results indicate that information quality plays a dominant role in influencing online satisfaction and trust. The mediating role of e-satisfaction between e-trust and e-loyalty is identified, and thus the online RQ development process: information quality → e-trust → e-satisfaction → e-loyalty→ intention to buy travel products.

Travel blogs are still effective to maintain customer relationship. However, they seem to lose interactivity and entertainment to readers.

Managerial implications lay emphasis on providing a completed circuit by integrating different social media to facilitate tourism information seeking.

This study is to develop a context-specific model of relationship marketing drivers to the travel blogosphere.

Tourism is a highly informative industry, thus the developments in technology and customer behavior that influence the level and availability of travel information are essential to understand (Indian Institute of Tourism & Travel Management, 2017). “Both on the demand side and on the supply side of tourism, blogging plays a major role, enabling tourists to communicate, track and respond on their opinions and service assessments directly with the visitors through multiple Internet platforms” (Kiráľová & Pavlíčeka, 2015). Through use of Internet as well as other information and communications technologies has paved the way for modern in the tourism industry. The significance of Blogs in the tourism market is huge. Ever more investigators are exploring the impact of blogging on tourism. The Blogging is going to be a major means of contact distributed throughout the country such as wildfires. The tourism industry has benefited most from the Internet, making blogging a crucial component of the marketing and preparation of the tourism industry (Sahoo & Mukunda, 2017). This section explores travel blogs as an expression of travel experience. Traveler views on prominent travel blog pages have been evaluated to obtain a sense of the experience expressed at the destination. Advancements technologies and a growing number of travel blogs make it easier for travel blog monitors to evaluate their service quality as a cost-effective method, and enhance the experience of the traveler (Pan, MacLaurin, & Crotts, 2007).

The purpose of this study is to identify Western travelers' image of Zhangjiajie, China as a tourist destination, drawing on data from contents of web travel blogs.

The study taps the rich content of travel blogs as an alternative research instrument to measure and understand negative and positive images of destinations formed by travelers. Analysis of content drawn from travel blog data followed qualitative methodology techniques and utilized NVivo software.

The study shows that travel blogs can form a good basis for measuring Western travelers' image of destination. This was the case for Zhangjiajie, where analysis of travelers' blogs indicated that they were impressed overall by the destination's beautiful natural scenery and were highly satisfied with nature‐based tourism attractions. The study also expounds on certain aspects of the destination that can be improved to satisfy Western travelers.

The majority of destination image studies rely on structured surveys developed from the researchers' point of view. This study attempts to explore tourists' own perspectives on the nature of a tourist destination by using travel blogs.

The purpose of this study was to determine how storytelling blogs affect readers’ intention to adopt travel products.

The present study proposes a storytelling framework based on heuristic theory for examining the characteristics and key components of a story that can affect the reader’s potential future behavior. An empirical study involving 368 subjects was conducted to test this model.

The results indicated that the elements of storytelling blogs, “perceived aesthetics”, “narrative structure”, and “self‐reference”, can indirectly influence readers’ intention through empathy and attitude. In particular, “perceived aesthetics” had the strongest direct effect on attitude and total effect on intention. Nevertheless, the control variables, age, gender, and frequency of searching for information about travel online, did not influence the intention.

The proposed framework can be used by enterprises to develop storytelling blogs for marketing their products. Blog design needs to consider aesthetics, narrative structure, and relevance to readers.

The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the influence of storytelling blogs from a heuristic perspective.

Travelers’ narratives disseminated online about destination experiences are an important source of information for measuring the performance of tourist destinations and understanding travelers’ perceptions, behaviors and expectations. Drawing on data from travel narratives, the purpose of this study is to examine the destination image of Istanbul as revealed in Western travel blogs. In addition, this study aims to identify the demographic characteristics of travelers who are more likely to engage in destination blogging activities.

A deductive content analysis approach was used on a sample of travel blog entries retrieved from TravelPod.com. Based on the dimensions and attributes of destination image identified by Beerli and Martín (2004), a coding scheme was established to guide the coding process.

The findings suggest that the online destination image of Istanbul is generally positive. Specifically, the destination is mainly appreciated for its cultural and historical heritage, as well as for its tourist infrastructure. However, the findings also highlight some issues that concern Western travelers, such as safety and traffic congestion.

This study is timely as it explores the online destination image of a key destination in a period of instability. The findings are expected to offer insights for destination management organizations in Turkey on how Western travelers view Istanbul as a tourist destination. These insights are also important to help policymakers and tourism destination marketers design effective strategies.

Using Travelpod.com, this paper aims to provide a methodology to locate central groups of travelers and to describe pattern characteristics of central travelers.

The paper uses snowball sampling to locate travelers and analyze their hyperlink interconnections to identify central travelers' groups. Analysis of the adjacency matrix of the social network of travelers using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis to identify core travelers' groups follows.

In total, 7 percent of travelers are considered central travelers. They form core groups containing the most active and information providing travelers. Group membership is correlated with common travelers' characteristics.

The research is limited to a specific network of travelers, to a specific time interval, and to a specific sampling method. Repetition of the study in other travelers' networks in several time instances using a full list of member travelers would help to generalize the findings. Also, graph theoretical approaches other than the statistical analysis used could reveal more properties.

Travelers in core groups are more likely to be reached by others who navigate through a series of incoming links that lead to them and it is probable that these travelers have the potential to address many visitors and therefore to have a significant impact on the provision of information.

The originality of the paper lies in the use of multivariate statistics on the network adjacency matrix to locate core travelers groups and on finding groups of the most influential travelers.

The present study investigates the impact of perceived enjoyment, blogger credibility and homophily on readers' engagement. Moreover, the study investigates the role exerted by blog engagement on intentions to follow blogger's recommendations. Despite the growing relevance of these issues, past studies have neglected the relevance of a joint analysis of such dimensions within the context of food blogs.

The empirical research builds on an online survey with a sample of 821 blog readers (353 Italian and 468 American). The proposed model was tested through structural equation modelling.

Results from a survey on Italian and American consumers show that perceived enjoyment and homophily have a significant effect on blog engagement, which, in turn, positively influences both intention to taste and visit. Moreover, blogger credibility does not show a significant influence on blog engagement for Italian and American followers.

The study contributes to a better understanding of the influence exerted by blog engagement on intention to follow blogger's recommendations. The study also examines perceived enjoyment, credibility and homophily as antecedents of engagement, which have not been extensively researched in the past with respect to food blogs.

This chapter aims to develop a holistic conceptual understanding of how tourism experiences are constructed, contextualized and packaged in the context of travel blogs. Tourist experiences are highlighted as an on-going process, continuously changing and altering during pre-, on-site-, and post-visit of tourist experiences. This chapter also examines the relationships between travel blog users’ motivation and engagement and tourist experience construction. As a result, a new dimension to the previous tourist experiences is offered.

The purpose of this study is to document how a traditional residential neighborhood, Ihwa village in Seoul, South Korea, is transformed into a tourist attraction and demonstrate the complexity of the overtourism phenomenon and the multifaceted conflicts among stakeholders that emerged in the course of urban transformation. Particularly, the study explores how tourism growth, urban transformation and overtourism are intertwined with each other and how the role of social media and media contributed to tourism growth and the transformation of an urban neighborhood.

The study conducted text analytics (a big data analysis) using personal blogs and news articles. Our data for text analytics was defined to retrieve all news articles and blogs existent in the NAVER portal, the largest Korean portal and search engine, for the period between January 1, 2006, and December 31, 2018. The data was collected using a web crawling program, TEXTOM version 3.0.

Text analysis of blog entries and news articles suggests that each medium has its unique role and domain to play. While the news media contributed to the initial surge of interest in Ihwa village, genuine growth of tourism in Ihwa village seems to be attributed to social media. Texts that appeared in blogs strongly indicated that people used their blogs to share their trip experiences, which can be subsequently assumed that blogs had an influential role in promoting a small place like Ihwa mural village, while news articles tended to highlight negative or unusual events occurred in Ihwa village. The study also addressed the multifaceted nature of the conflicts that were inherent in the issue of urban regeneration and how those conflicts were developed and manifested in the process of touristification and overtourism in Ihwa village. As touristification can manifest in various forms in different places, the case of Ihwa village demonstrates a unique development of touristification; private tourism companies or tourism agencies did not initiate or intend to cause tourism gentrification. Rather, touristification is a byproduct of urban revitalization through public art and is a result of interplay between the local government’s interest, social media and new tourist demand.

Text analytics using big data have rarely been attempted to understand the role of social media in relation to tourism growth and touristification of an urban tourism place. This study advances the literature by applying big data analysis to user-generated content in blogs. The study also contributes to the deeper understanding of a different developmental pattern of touristification in an urban tourism place as well as the complexity of the overtourism phenomenon and the multifaceted conflicts among stakeholders.