The document discusses using netnography, an adaptation of ethnography for online communities, to understand Chinese travellers' expectations of travelling in Europe. It details how the researcher conducted qualitative and quantitative netnography on blogs and social media to identify themes around travelling and Europe. Key themes identified included travellers seeking beautiful natural environments, clean cities, and shopping destinations while remaining price conscious. The analysis provided insights to help promote pan-European tourism products and experiences to the Chinese market.

1. Uncovering travellers’ expectations through
‘netnography’
An innovative approach to market research
ISCONTOUR 2014, Krems, Austria
Stefanie Gallob
Research Project Manager
European Travel Commission

2. European Travel Commission
ETC is an international non profit-making organisation based in Brussels.
ETC is responsible for the promotion of Europe as a tourist destination.
It represents 33 National Tourist Organisations (NTOs) in Europe.
ETC undertakes three basic activities: marketing, research and advocacy.
“Work together to build the value of tourism to all the beautiful and
diverse countries of Europe through cooperating in areas of sharing best
practices, market intelligence and promotion".

3. MEMBERS

4. Central to ETC's strategy is the development of a competitive and
sustainable European tourism sector, by raising the awareness of and
interest in Europe as a tourist destination in long-haul markets.
ETC does this by initiating marketing activities to promote pan-European
products and themes, which are complementary to the individual
marketing actions of its members.
Prior market research determines the choice of activities and campaigns
in overseas markets – United States, Canada, China and Brazil.
Our Strategy

5. Pan-European marketing approach
Visiteurope.com
VisitEurope App
Videos
Competitions
Social media

6. Market Research
Handbooks &
Best Practices
Trends Watch
Dissemination tools
A holistic approach to market intelligence

7. Four megatrends shaping future travel
• Growth shifting to new destinations
• Shorter trips and short term booking
Changing customer needs
• Sustainable practices
• Increasing price of mobility
Infrastructure and mobility
• Deeper consumer insight
• Multi & cross-channel marketing
New technology
• Mass customization
• Success factor: technology
Capabilities for the future
Source: The Boston Consulting Group

8. Four megatrends shaping future travel
• Growth shifting to new destinations
• Shorter trips and short term booking
Changing customer needs
• Sustainable practices
• Increasing price of mobility
Infrastructure and mobility
• Deeper consumer insight
• Multi & cross-channel marketing
New technology
• Mass customization
• Success factor: technology
Capabilities for the future
New insights through
UGC to improve
marketing strategies.

9. Web 2.0 – From screen to conversations
“A group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow for the creation and
exchanges of user-generated content.”
Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010

10. Research implications
Digital footprints
on multiple
channels

11. vast
noisy
distributed
unstructured
dynamic
Research implications
Source: Gundecha & Liu, 2012, Mining Social Media

12. Big data evolution, application & research
Evolution Application
BI&A 1.0
DBMS-Based,
Structured content
BI&A 2.0
Web-Based,
Unstructured Content
BI&A 3.0
Mobile and Sensor-
based Content
E-Commerce and
Market Intelligence
E-Government and
Politics 2.0
Science & Technology
Smart Health and
Wellbeing
Security and Public
Safety
Emerging Research
(Big) Data Analytics
Text Analytics
Web Analytics
Network Analytics
Mobile Analytics
Source: Chen, Chiang, & Storey , 2012, Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big Data to Big Impact

13. An innovative and cost-effective research approach
Understand the mind of travellers
through netnography
Netnography = ethnography
adapted to the online social world
QUALITATIVE text
analysis
QUANTIATIVE text
analysis

14. Netnography defined
“Netnography is ethnography adapted to the
study of online communities.”
Kozinets, 2002
Ethnography
A research method designed to
explore cultural phenomena.
Researcher observes a community by
becoming one of its members.
Online communities
Social aggregations that emerge from
the net when enough people carry on
public discussions.
Source: Kozinets, 2002, 2006; Rheingold, 1995

15. sWhat netnography is and what it is not
captures themes,
preferences and
experiences
qualitative and
nuanced insights on
consumers
not
representative of
the entire population
frequency ≠
volume

16. Overt vs. covert netnography
unobtrusive
natural
conversations
superficial
validation

17. Examples of netnographic research in tourism
Example Study Topic/Themes Data Source Websites/Communities
Nimrod (2012) Older adult’s tourism e.g. Coolgrandma.com, discuss.50plus.com
Mkono (2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2012) Authenticity in cultural touristic experience Tripadvisor.com, Igougo.com,
Virtualtourist.com, Lonelyplanet.com
Ong & Cros (2012) Chinese backpackers tourism in Macau Mofang community
Podoshen & Hunt (2011) Holocaust, tourism of sacred sites Jewishcurrentevents.com
Janta, Brown, Lugosi & Ladkin (2011) Tourism employment and workplace experiences Unspecified
O’Connor (2010) Guest satisfaction and dissatisfaction with
hospitality; hotelier responses to WOM
Tripadvisor.com
Perfetto & Dholakai (2010) Medical tourism cultural contradictions Unspecified
Rokka & Moisander (2009) Environmental dialogue in online communities Tavellerspoint.com
Hsu, Dehuang & Woodside (2009) Urban tourism experiences in China
Interpretation of place and people
Google searches
Osti (2009) Official destination websites, User-Generated-
Content
On-Ice.com
Woodside, Cruickshank & Dehuang
(2007)
Destination brands, destination myths Google searches
Source: Mkono, 2013, Netnography in qualitative tourism research

18. The netnographic research process
Selection of
appropriate
markets
Research
questions
Identification of
relevant
‘communities’/sites
Manual or
automated
techniques
Entire body of
microblogs and
blogs
Broad keyword
searches
Content analysis
Text analytics
- Extraction
- Clustering
- Association
- Visualisation
In-depth reading
and qualitative
analysis
Refining
Generalising
Theorising
Publication &
presentation
Research
planning
Data
collection
Data
analysis
Interpretation &
presentation

19. What is the
meaning of
travelling?
What are drivers and
barriers?
What is Europe’s appeal?
What are the main
themes and tourism
products?
Research planning – Research questions
Desk research
Profile of the internet user
Outbound travel market
Netnography
Meaning of travel
Expectations
Appeal and perceptions
Values and Behaviour
Drivers and barriers
Highlights
Themes
Objectives

20. Research planning – Communities & Sites
relevant
active
interactive
substantial
heterogeneous
data-rich
site
characteristics
market specific
travel-oriented
timely

21. Types of social media
Online social networks Blogging Microblogging
Wikis Social news Social bookmarking
Media sharing Opinions, reviews, ratings Answers
Source: Gundecha & Liu, 2012, Mining Social Media
vKontakte Qzone Facebook
Facebook Tencent Weibo Orkut
Odnoglassiniki Sina Weibo Google+
Top social networking sites

22. Data collection
manual
• individual conversations
• standard programmes and tools
• archival data
• elicited data
• fieldnote data
• reflective data
automated
• extended data corpus
• data mining tools and software
• dealing with unstructured data
• data transformation
amountofdata100 - 1,000
millions
large noisy dynamic
Characteristics of social media

23. Text analytics in social media
Text corpus
blogs
microblogs
social networking sites
fora/chats
Preprocessing
stop word removal
stemming
Representation
reduction to machine
readable format
Knowledge
discovery
classification
clustering
associations
sentiment analysis
Source: after Hu & Liu, 2012, Text analytics in social media
Discovery of knowledge from texts
Set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and
structure the information content of textual sources

24. Qualitative data analysis & interpretation
coding
noting
abstracting
and
comparing
refining
generalising
theorising
Source: Kozinets, 2010, Nentography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online
in-depth reading of
individual blogs,
microblogs, forum
posts and other online
content
nuanced
understanding of
patterns
from quantitative
analysis

25. Advantages & Disadvantages
Source: Mkono, 2013, Netnography in qualitative tourism research; Janta, 2013, Presentation on netnography
rich data available online
geographically dispersed
unobtrusive
cost-effective
downloadable & archival data
naturally occurring conversations
candid insights
anonymity
passivity
cannot probe or direct content
no access to non-verbal cues
superficiality
representativeness of the market
language & geographic boundaries

26. The Chinese blogosphere – A case study
40%
538 million
younger age groups
higher socio-economic
status

27. Netnographic research design
QUANTITATIVE
netnography
• Over 50 million microblog posts
• Over 20 million blog posts
• Search statistics from Internet
search engines Baidu and
Google
• Clustering of bloggers into travel
groups and extraction of themes
and trends related to travel and
Europe
QUALITATIVE
netnography
• In-depth reading of individual
blogs, microblogs, forum posts
and other online content
• Semiotic analysis of over 1,000
photographs
• A qualitative analysis of travel
types, motivations and
behaviour

28. The new Chinese traveller
• Looks for an in-depth travel experience (from
standardized group travel to FIT)
• Better educated (81% of Chinese outbound travellers
hold higher educational degree)
• Is skilled with social media and Internet usage (538
million Internet users, 3 times as active in social
media as American Internet users)
• Is an urban dweller
• Remains price sensitive

29. Planning a trip to Europe
Peaceful,
quiet and
clean
environments

30. ”Take a picture in any direction and it will
show a beautiful landscape. Look anywhere
and you will see a sky bluer than what you’ve
ever seen in Beijing.”
Blue skies an underestimated advantage

31. Experiencing a trip in Europe
Cities are peaceful, clean, skies are blue
Not crowded
Good preservation of historic attractions
Environmental protection, clean and beautiful
Rich cultural past, sophisticated
Delicious and safe food
High prices
Tedious visa application process
Lack of Chinese language information
Unable to use Chinese debit cards
Bad food in general and bad Chinese food in particular
Bad service, shops close early
Worse hotel facilities than in China

32. Authenticity … but only in certain doses
”Does Kiruna have a Chinese restaurant? I don’t
care so much but I’m travelling with my mother
and I’m afraid she won’t like the local food.”

33. ”Europe is a shopping heaven, it has all luxury brands,
whether Louis Vuitton or Cartier or Hermes. So I go to
Europe to get the most choices when buying luxury
products.”
Chinese Travel Budget
34% shopping
17% air fare
18% accommodation
9% entertainment
3% travel agency service
Europe is ”the” place for shopping

34. ”Renting a bicycle in the
Netherlands costs 10 euro per
day. For that price I can get a
second hand bicycle in China.”
Food, accommodation, and transportation
are items where most travellers try to
save money, whereas entertainment and
shopping are allowed to be more costly.
Chinese travellers are still price conscious

35. ”I and my beloved wife travelled to amazing Greece. We
experienced the sweetness and romance of the myriad
Greek islands, embraced the serendipitous blue sky at the
Aegean Sea, kissed in front of temple ruins, and felt the
warm breeze on a passionate boat trip. We will forever live
happily together.”
Courtesy of Chai Ran and Huang
Yanfang
Mention: +150% p.y.
Europe is ideal for honeymoon travel
Photography is a central aspect of
honeymoon travel.

36. Choose your tribe
…but do not
overlook the
Traditionalists!

37. Triangulation of methods
netnography
deskresearch
interviews
focus groups
questionnaires

38. Pan-European Themes
• History, culture,
heritage
• Gastronomy
• Health and wellbeing
• Sporting activities
• Religious tourism
• Shopping
Inspiration through
targeted e-marketing activities
• Emotional
connection
ties spurred by movies, music,
literature and online content
• Collection of pan-
European experiences
not countries
• A must-see destination
Capitalise on delights
and eliminate barriers
• Quality infrastructure
• Diversity
• Safe
• Legal and perceptual
barriers
Conclusions and next steps…

39. A glimpse of the future...
B2C portal Visiteurope.com European Portal on Gastronomic Events
www.tastingeurope.com
A refreshed consumer
portal and
complementary
marketing activities
Enhance the promotion of
transnational thematic
tourism products
The pan-European experience

40. Thank you for your attention!
Stefanie Gallob
Project Manager – Reserach & Development
European Travel Commission
contact: stefanie.galllob@visiteurope.com