97 VALUE CREATION IN TOURISM THROUGH ACTIVE TOURIST ENGAGEMENT: A FRAMEWORK FOR
97 VALUE CREATION IN TOURISM THROUGH ACTIVE TOURIST ENGAGEMENT: A FRAMEWORK FOR ONLINE REVIEWS – Contributions by Rodoula H. Tsiotsou
Introduction
Customer engagement (CE) has emerged as a major research stream in marketing, attracting significant research attention since 2010. CE became important because it impacts either directly (e.g., increased market share, sales, and profit margin) or indirectly (e.g., enhanced feedback efficiency, customer social capital, and relationship quality) firm performance (Verhoef et al., 2010), and creates value for the actors involved (Tsiotsou, 2021). Accordingly, tourist engagement (TE) has attracted research and managerial interest in tourism services due to its positive effects on tourist behavior such as usage (Harrigan et al., 2017), purchase intentions (Tu et al., 2018), patronage (Giebelhausen et al., 2017), and word-of-mouth (Choi & Kandampully, 2019). Moreover, research shows that engaged tourists demonstrate high levels of trust (Rather, 2019), satisfaction (Sharma and Sarmah, 2019), loyalty (Chen & Rahman, 2018), advocacy (Bilro et al., 2018), and they create value for themselves, other tourists, and tourism firms (Tsiotsou, 2021). According to a recent review of the literature conducted by Hao (2020), engagement-related research in tourism can be organized into six main streams: CE, employee/work engagement, community/resident engagement, institutional/hotel engagement, student/learner engagement, and civic/volunteer engagement. CE attracted most research attention while online TE is gaining popularity due to its increasing importance.
This chapter considers online reviews in the realm of engagement research to understand how value is created in this context. As an expression of active TE, online reviews are of particular interest to both tourism academics and practitioners because they create value for their writers, other tourists, and tourism businesses. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to advance our understanding of TE expressed as online reviews and value creation in this environment. The objectives of the chapter are threefold: a) to synthesize the most relevant literature on online tourist reviews and present their value creation outcomes for the main actors involved, b) to identify research gaps, and c) to provide future research directives. To that end, a value creation conceptual framework, ValCOR, is proposed, which includes the motives/benefits, moderators, and value-related outcomes of online reviews for review writers, other tourists, and tourism firms. The proposed framework assists in identifying knowledge gaps and provides future research recommendations.
The chapter is organized as follows. First, the concept of engagement is discussed. Then, the proposed framework is presented, and the chapter concludes with an epilogue that provides future research directives.
The Concept of Engagement
Van Doorn et al. (2010, p. 254) defined engagement as a “customers’ behavioral manife