Chapter 5: Social Media and the Co-Creation of Tourism Experiences

The chapter aims to investigate the role and the impact of social media in influencing and shaping (new) tourism experiences.

A service dominant logic and co-creation approach and concepts was adopted for examining how the social media can influence interactions and participation that represent two major sources of tourism experiences.

The chapter provides several arguments showing how social media-enabled interactions and participation can facilitate, foster, and expand the experience co-creation process by altering: when, how, why, what, by whom, and how tourism experiences are co-created.

The chapter develops and argues a theoretical framework that needs to be further validated, refined, and expanded in various contexts.

The chapter provides several examples showing the practical implications on how tourists and tourism firms use the social media for enriching their interactions and participation in the co-creation of tourism experiences.

The chapter also illustrates how the social interactions supported and fostered by the social media can be used for influencing, shaping and promoting specific tourism experiences (i.e., sustainable tourism behavior, socially responsible tourism development).

Past research on technology enhanced tourism experiences has adopted a phenomenological approach to explaining experience creation. The chapter expands this literature by advocating the individualized and the socially co-constructed nature of tourism experiences as well as by adopting an intersubjective approach for explaining how the social media enable an iterative process among the tourists’ and their social context that in turn is responsible for the continuous formation of tourism experiences.