Networking holidays

Social networking is playing an increasingly important role in where people decide to go on holiday and what they do when they get there.

Dr Tianyu Ying (Tourism) is researching the role of social networking in tourism, as companies use social media and information technology to market themselves, and potential tourists use the same channels to research destinations and activities.

“Traditionally, if we want to analyse tourist behaviours, we look at how they are affected by individual attributes such as age, gender, family income, or education,” says Ying. “Nowadays, we can also use sophisticated techniques to quantify all of the networking connections between people. So it opens up a whole new window to understanding social phenomena.”

Ying explains that he has been looking at how people travelling overseas use social media such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and online forums.

“If I am searching for information, to try to make a decision where I want to go for my next vacation, I not only look at how much it will cost, but where my friends went last time.”

He says that people are also using social networking once they arrive at their destination. “If I am outside a restaurant, I can get an immediate response on my smart phone on whether it is the restaurant my friends went to. And I can immediately book online and get a huge discount before I go in.

“This involves the credibility of the information and, so far, it's looking to me as if people tend to trust personal information on the net more than that supplied by commercial operators.”

Ying adds that he is collaborating with IT friends to develop a mobile phone application that would create what he calls disposable – or one-time – social networks and combining it with other information services.

“If you are a backpacker travelling to new places, at some point you might feel lonely or anxious and you could locate other backpackers within a range of a few hundred metres who are interested in doing something you are interested in.”

Thirty-four-year-old Ying says that members of his parents' generation are still more likely to rely on traditional sources of information such as a travel agency and to front up to a travel agent's office to book a complete package covering destination and activities, but this is starting to change as older people acquire smart phones and share holiday photos.

China-born Ying studied tourism management at Zhejiang University in China, completed a PhD on social networks in tourism at Clemson University in South Carolina, and took up a position as a lecturer at Otago in 2011.