Relationship between tourism weblog browsing behavior and tourism

In the field of tourism research, "Weblog" or "Blog" is often used in parallel with terms such as "Tourism Notes" and "Online Tourism Narratives", with the core referring to user-generated tourism content. In this article, "Weblog" generally refers to structured travel records including personal blogs and column travel notes, which together with short social media content constitute the user-generated tourism narrative system. It is a common phenomenon that a tourist will browse a tourism weblog for collecting information. Will the browsing behavior affect the tourism expectation of a tourist and how does the influence happen? That is the main question we’d like to explore in this study. We also classified the participants and their messages posted on weblogs for further analysis. Firstly, we selected 153 participants from snowball sampling and selected 2 weblogs with high CTR (click-through rate), good interaction, and frequent updates. Then the participants' tourism weblog browsing behaviors were recorded for 10 weeks. After all, each participant received a questionnaire about tourism expectations. Factor analysis, content analysis, and cluster analysis were used to analyze the data collected in this research. We found that there is no evidence to prove the relationship between the frequency of browsing tourism weblogs and tourism expectations. On the other side, the browsing hours are positively related to 2 factors of tourism expectation: easily local customs and novel involvement. Furthermore, after cluster analysis and content analysis we found the high involvers left messages with more personal emotion and identification and the low involvers left messages with more objective information. In the end, this study proposed some discussion and suggestions based on our findings.