Tourists’ Online and Face-to-Face Social Contact and Destination Immersion

Authors

  • Daisy Fan Department of Tourism and Hospitality Faculty of Management Bournemouth University
  • Dimitrios Buhalis Department of Tourism and Hospitality Faculty of Management Bournemouth University
  • Bingna Lin The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Keywords:

online social contact, face-to-face social contact, destination immersion, liminality, contact-liminality nexus

Abstract

Tourism is stated to provide a process of transition. Tourists are claimed to enter a liminal space when traveling. Along with the development of the internet, the liminal sense of tourism has been greatly haunted by the advanced communication technology. The current study, adopting a qualitative approach, explored tourists' online and on-site social contact when traveling with different groups. A six-fold tourist typology was established to portrait their behavioural patterns with robust theoretical evidence supported. A contact-liminality nexus was also developed to indicate different tourist types' tendency between their original zone and the liminal zone. Both theoretical contributions and practical implications were discussed.

Author Biography

Daisy Fan, Department of Tourism and Hospitality Faculty of Management Bournemouth University

Daisy Fan is Lecturer in the Department of Tourism and Hospitality at Bournemouth University, UK. Her research interests include tourist-host social contact, tourists’ ethnocentrism, cultural distance and cruise travel. She is a Ph.D. graduate of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and worked in a hotel consulting company in Hong Kong prior to her study.

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Published

2019-01-30

How to Cite

Fan, D., Buhalis, D. and Lin, B. (2019) “Tourists’ Online and Face-to-Face Social Contact and Destination Immersion”, e-Review of Tourism Research, 16(2/3). Available at: https://ertr-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/ertr/article/view/336 (Accessed: 28 March 2024).

Issue

Section

Articles