Welcome to InteractiveTourism :)

Hello everybody,

I would like to welcome you to my blog InteractiveTourism. This is my first blog post and I will be explaining what the main purpose of my blog will be. 

According to one of the readings that we have read during our course Passions of Tourism, tourism has expanded to a major contributor of the global flows of people including a wide range of activities and therefore is said to be one of the largest industries in the world. Thus, this industry seems to be relevant for firms. With regard to our assignment, I had to choose a theme to investigate tourism so that I will visit the tourist attractions with a certain angle. My theme will be social media and I will take several theoretical concepts into account to form an opinion on the tourists attractions and its usage of social media in the city Groningen. This will be a large part on my blog, namely to apply theories on the things that I’ve observed. There is one main theory that I will be using all the time, namely Web 2.0. Web 2.0 states that from the supplier as well as the consumer side numerous things have changed, such that there is increasingly more interaction between the supplier and consumer which causes collaborations between those two. I find this very interesting and to keep on track on this in a more concrete way, I have set myself the following 3 objectives:

1.       Find out if social media are an effective tool to attract more tourists to tourist attractions in Groningen, so is the popularity of some tourist attractions due to their social media strategy?

2.      Whether the tourist’s usage of social media also influences the popularity of tourist attractions.

The internet has become a giant medium which influences tourists significantly. Tourists are able to share their experiences and this will in turn influence other tourists to visit a tourist attraction or not.

3.       To explore if I’m going to find at the tourist attractions things that put emphasize on social media. Most of the tourist attractions I have already visited, so this time it would be interesting to especially focus on the things that might link to social media.

At the end of my blog I will give an overview of everything that I have observed during my visits. Additionally, I will focus on my 3 objectives and elaborate on them to provide a good conclusion.

Finally I would like to say: 

Have fun reading my blog!

See you next time,

Melisse 

Me being a real tourist in Chengdu situated in China a few years ago!

I think I will be posting every blog post one personal picture to give some extra personal touch to my blog! Just for fun, hope you'll like it!