Description
This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of online vacation rentals (OVRs) (a new source of
e-business travel growth) and how the concept of sense of place is presented by tourists’ online reviews.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Online reviews of short-term visits: exploring sense of place
J oana Afonso Dias Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro Antónia Correia
Article information:
To cite this document:
J oana Afonso Dias Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro Antónia Correia , (2013),"Online reviews of short-term visits: exploring sense of place",
International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7 Iss 4 pp. 364 - 374
Permanent link to this document:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJ CTHR-02-2012-0006
Downloaded on: 24 January 2016, At: 22:23 (PT)
References: this document contains references to 49 other documents.
To copy this document: [email protected]
The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 391 times since 2013*
Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:
Peter De Maeyer, (2012),"Impact of online consumer reviews on sales and price strategies: a review and directions for future research",
J ournal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 21 Iss 2 pp. 132-139http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10610421211215599
Eleonora Pantano, Loredana Di Pietro, (2013),"From e-tourism to f-tourism: emerging issues from negative tourists' online reviews", J ournal
of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, Vol. 4 Iss 3 pp. 211-227http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/J HTT-02-2013-0005
Hua-Ning Chen, Chun-Yao Huang, (2013),"An investigation into online reviewers' behavior", European J ournal of Marketing, Vol. 47 Iss 10
pp. 1758-1773http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EJ M-11-2011-0625
Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:115632 []
For Authors
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about
how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/
authors for more information.
About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com
Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than
290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional
customer resources and services.
Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and
also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.
*Related content and download information correct at time of download.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
Online reviews of short-term visits:
exploring sense of place
Joana Afonso Dias, Filipa Perdiga˜ o Ribeiro and Anto´ nia Correia
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of online vacation rentals (OVRs) (a newsource of
e-business travel growth) and how the concept of sense of place is presented by tourists’ online reviews.
Design/methodology/approach – The initial assumption for this exploratory study is that OVRs bring
both material and intangible advantages to the individual consumer and to the community of
homeowners. Using a qualitative approach, within the conceptual framework of a sense of place,
multidimensional meanings presented by tourists’ online reviews of their travel experience and home
rentals were explored.
Findings – The ?ndings point to a sense of place constructed through affordances of place, home and
a functional sense of place. They seem to indicate that these testimonials come from a close-knit virtual
community; although the site is open to all, it is primarily used by British-to-British. The data reveal
neither any salient expression of social interaction between these tourists and the local community nor
any references to the cultural context, thus pointing to the dimensions of security and familiarity and to
the absence of any travelling-to-learn motivation.
Research limitations/implications – It remains unclear whether sense of place, as de?ned here, is the
outcome of the limitations induced by the channel and textual genre. Future research on this virtual
community, via interviews and questionnaires, could clarify this question.
Originality/value – The analysis of this new form of tourism and the innovative design of this research,
based on textual analysis of free elicited data, are the main contributions of this paper.
Keywords Online reviews, Online vacation rentals, Qualitative approach, Sense of place
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The increasing signi?cance of online reviews for all kinds of consumption decisions implies a
need for a better understanding of their in?uence within the tourism context. Inarguably,
consumers rely more than ever on online search strategies, using blog pages, forums and
review sites when making product decisions (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). The internet has
reshaped the way tourism-related information is distributed and the way people plan for and
consume travel (Buhalis and Law, 2008). Online vacation rentals (OVRs) are a new market
segment of online travel’s ‘‘long tail’’ and a newsource of e-business travel growth. HomeAway
Holiday-Rentals UK provides an interesting example of this scenario, as it offers a holiday
rental marketplace for both private property owners to display their properties and potential
guests to choose their accommodation and contact property owners. Through this web site,
homeowners publicize their properties by postingphotographs andbrief descriptions of them.
After holidaying at a property, travellers may voluntarily post short online reviews about their
accommodation and overall holiday experience. The rental process and amounts paid
proceed on a private individual basis between owner and customer. These testimonials have
the potential to in?uence substantial numbers of future consumers of this type of
accommodation; for instance, the leader among OVR companies – HomeAway (2011) –
represents the owners of over 540,000 holiday rental homes in 145 countries.
PAGE 364
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013, pp. 364-374, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182 DOI 10.1108/IJCTHR-02-2012-0006
Joana Afonso Dias is based
in the Department of
Management and
Marketing, INUAF –
Instituto Superior Afonso III,
Loule´ , Portugal.
Filipa Perdiga˜ o Ribeiro is
based at CECL, School of
Management, Hospitality
and Tourism, University of
the Algarve, Faro, Portugal.
Anto´ nia Correia is based at
CEFAGE, Faculty of
Economy, University of the
Algarve, Faro, Portugal.
Received 15 February 2012
Revised 29 March 2012
Accepted 17 April 2012
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
This study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of OVRs by analyzing how tourists’
testimonials, in online reviews, describe their holiday experience in the Algarve (South of
Portugal), and in particular how sense of place comes across. Within this region, two
different settings were chosen – inland and coastline – from which the two most popular
municipalities were selected, amounting to a total of 116 reviews collected from HomeAway.
co.uk. This study started from the assumption that these travellers were typically on ‘‘an
escape from the ordinary and on a quest for more desirable and ful?lling places’’ (Urry,
1995). However, in 2007, Larsen et al. (2007, p. 246) presented a critique of this theory
which, according to the authors, entailed ‘‘rather ?xed dualisms: away as opposed to home,
authenticity as opposed to inauthenticity, the extraordinary as opposed to the ordinary and
guests as opposed to host’’. Thus, the authors ‘‘de-exoticize tourism theory’’ or, in other
words, claim that tourism practices today lean towards being ‘‘home away from home’’. The
tourism-as-an-escape theory, which entailed ‘‘moments of the ‘tourist gaze’’’ (Larsen et al.,
2007, p. 246), seemed initially to indicate that the group of travellers who use OVRs are
looking for closer contact (social relationships) with the local community (Kianicka et al.,
2006), which is one of the categories relevant to the concept of sense of place (Stedman,
2003). Thus, the purpose of this investigation is to determine whether qualitative indicators of
a sense of place can be identi?ed in travellers’ reviews of OVRs. The presence of customer
reviews on a web site has been shown to improve customers’ perceptions of the usefulness
of this medium (Kumar and Benbasat, 2006). It is also widely recognized that word-of-mouth
(WOM), both positive and negative, has the potential to in?uence customer purchasing
decisions (Sparks and Browning, 2011). Thus, the research questions that guide the online
reviews analysis are as follows:
RQ1. Howdo these tourists construct their sense of place (i.e. meanings) with regard to
their elective place for holidaying?
RQ2. How do these tourists appear to interact with the local community and local
place(s)?
RQ3. Are there differences between tourists who choose to stay in Albufeira (coastal
town, known for its nightlife and entertainment) and those who stay in the more
secluded and rural area of Silves town and its surroundings?
And ?nally, a more general question is:
RQ4. What are these tourists seeking when they choose this particular way of
holidaying?
2. Sense of place and affordances of place
Undisputably, there is no single theory of sense of place. Rather, it is understood in many
different ways within the academic literature. In human geography, sense of place is a term
used to encompass all the subjective meanings that become attached in some way to a
place (Cresswell, 2006). Thus, when people talk about places, they may well project myriad
meanings that arise from their experiences, senses and feelings (Torkington, 2011, p. 43).
The humanist geographer Tuan (1980) introduced a broad de?nition of the concept ‘‘sense
of place’’, which amalgamated the meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings of
individuals or groups. His de?nition also included awareness about a place and attributes
that differentiate it from other places. At the same time, the construct of place attachment
emerged as an umbrella concept encompassing place relations as diverse as ‘‘at
homeness’’ (Seamon, 1979), ‘‘place dependence’’ (Williams et al., 1992), and even ‘‘place
identity’’ (Proshansky et al., 1983).
Nowadays, the literature considers sense of place to be the meaning and emotion humans
assign to geographic spaces (Stedman, 2003). Importantly, sense of place is not a static
concept, it changes in response to in?uences inside and outside communities and this
change of meaning also results from individuals’ life experience (Davenport and Anderson,
2005; Kianicka et al., 2006). Historic, cultural, social, ecological and also physical attributes
may all contribute to the creation of place meanings; therefore, the present study assumes
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 365
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
sense of place to be socially constructed (Kyle and Chick, 2007, p. 222). At the same time,
and even for ?rst-time visitors to a destination, Halpenny (2006) claims that a sense of place
attachment may have been formed prior to their ?rst visit. This could be based on stories
about the destination from friends and family, or the mass media, such as TV shows. Our
research seems to indicate that a prior sense of place attachment could also be based on
online reviews of the place/house chosen for a future visit.
According to the social sciences (Gieryn, 2000, p. 465), place has at least three fundamental
features:
1. geographic location (a place is a unique spot in the universe);
2. material form (a place has physicality); and
3. investment in meaning and value (i.e. without naming through toponyms, identifying or
representing, a place is not a place).
This last feature is of particular interest to us, as it conceptualizes places as doubly
constructed: they ‘‘are built or in some way physically carved out’’ but they are also
‘‘interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood and imagined’’ (Soja, 1996 in Gieryn,
2000, p. 465).
Thus, this research draws on several conceptualizations of sense of place: ‘‘place
attachment’’ which refers to the phenomenon of human-place bonding, usually described as
the positive bond that develops between groups or individuals and their environment
(Altman and Low, 1992; Brocato, 2006; Relph, 1976; Williams et al., 1992); ‘‘place identity’’
which is a substructure of a more global self-identi?cation; and ‘‘place dependence’’ as an
occupant’s perceived strength of association between him or herself and speci?c places
(Stokols and Shumaker, 1981).
Therefore, following in the footsteps of social scientists such as Gieryn (2000) and Tuulentie
(2007), this investigation argues that a place is remarkable because it is a compound of
material formand interpretative understandings or experiences. This study operationalises a
simpli?ed version of sense of place by applying categories which, when combined, may
indicate the sense of place textually constructed in online reviews by the group of tourists
under observation. As mentioned earlier, although sense of place entails the collection of
meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings that individuals or groups associate with a
particular location, the textual data collected point to what appears to be a functional and
restricted sense of place. Thus, we propose to explore the following salient dimensions of
sense of place: physical characteristics of the environment, their affect and meaning, and
the activities afforded by the place (the concept of ‘‘affordances of place’’ was ?rst
described by the perceptual psychologist Gibson (1986/1979) as being ‘‘neutral’’, since it
consists of all the action possibilities perceived in a particular environment); in practice,
however, affordances of place are drawn upon in discourse as positive evaluation strategies
(Torkington, 2011, p. 139) and the social interactions associated with a place.
3. Online communities and online reviews
In answer to the increasing consumer demand for unbiased travel information, the so-called
tourism ‘‘eMediaries’’ provide online reviews of hotels at popular travel destinations
(e.g. www.tripadvisor.com). Studies have explored the issue of online reviews, or electronic
WOM, focusing mainly on matters such as the motivation for, and the social dynamics
between, users of and contributors to review sites. Past research has broadly analyzed the
role of online recommendation systems (Chen et al., 2004; Gretzel and Fesenmaier, 2006),
the role of expert reviews (Cheng and Xie, 2005) and the positive effect feedback
mechanisms can have on buyer trust (Ba and Pavlou, 2002). Although our aim is not to
investigate online reviews’ impact on consumer decision-making, as Chevalier and Mayzlin
(2006) and Sen and Lerman (2007) have done, the effect of these reviews on consumer
decisions is reported to be powerful. HomeAway.co.uk (2009) states that ‘‘reviews frompast
guests are one of the most important parts’’ of their product. This being true, travellers
actively research reviews before making an enquiry, and data show ‘‘that properties with just
PAGE 366
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
3 reviews receive on average 23 percent more enquires than those with no reviews’’
(HomeAway Holiday-Rentals co.uk). Moreover, the more positive feedback that houses get
from renters, the more the advert will be viewed and, as a consequence, the more
reservation requests, i.e. as a peer-to-peer relationship – the owner will receive.
Interpersonal in?uence and WOMare ranked the most important information sources when a
consumer is making a purchasing decision. Such in?uence may be especially important in
the hospitality and tourism industry, as its intangible products are dif?cult to evaluate prior to
consumption (Litvin et al., 2008). One aspect of cyberspace is the phenomenon of online
interpersonal in?uence (Senecal and Nantel, 2004). Online customer reviews can be de?ned
as peer-generated product evaluations posted on company or third-party web sites. This
background explains how sense of place begins to take formwell before tourists actually set
foot in the Algarve. Thus, and following Urry’s (1995) earlier conceptualization, one could say
that the would-be-tourist’s gaze is directed by anticipation, by the promotional narratives of
the tourism industry, and by cultural stereotypes and expectations.
4. Contextual setting
The textual corpus consists of 116 online reviews (14,875 words in total) selected according
to the most frequent and most recent criteria. The salient dimensions explored in these online
reviews are the physical characteristics of the place environment, the affect and meaning
attributed to place, the activities afforded by the place, and the social interactions
associated with the place.
The Algarve, in Southern Portugal, is one of the most popular tourist regions in Europe. It is
home to a population of around 400,000 citizens and attracts approximately 5,000,000
tourists every year. At 44 percent of all overseas guests, UK visitors make up the key tourism
source market of the Algarve, of which 50 percent are hosted in apartments or friends’
houses (A
´
guas and Melo, 1997), followed by those from Spain, Germany and The
Netherlands (ANA, 2008). According to Baker et al.’s (2009, p. 4) report, half of UK overseas
home-owners bought properties in coastal locations over recent decades. Moreover,
Almeida (2010) shows that of those who stated they bought a house in the Algarve, 21
percent bought it directly from their previous owner, 18 percent directly from friends and 48
percent used an estate agent. The present study focuses on short-term house rentals and
the data sample reveals that UK online tourists choose accommodation owned and posted
on the web site by English native speakers solely, as the adverts are signed with British
names and are associated with UK phone numbers. This fact, although not generalizable to
all the houses available in the Algarve on the HomeAway Holiday-Rentals web site, seems to
point to a consistent pattern: these tourists choose familiar ground, thus highlighting the
dimensions of security and familiarity, and valuing networking rather than learning.
The analysis is based on a convenience sample of tourists’ postings collected from the web
site HomeAway Holiday Rentals (www.holiday-rentals.co.uk). Using a qualitative explorative
approach to the textual data, the postings were analyzed in order to understand how and
why tourists represent their own sense of place in terms of the Algarve and/or village where
they stayed, and whether a sense of place is present in their testimonials. A comparison
between two different locations – both situated in the tourist region of the Algarve: the
coastal town of Albufeira (58 reviews posted in 2008-2010: 8,518 words) and the inland
destinations Silves and Monchique (58 reviews posted in 2007-2010: 6,357 words) – was
also carried out to tease out patterns of similarity and/or difference, since the type of
accommodation available in these two sub-regions is different: in Albufeira, tourists mostly
stay in small apartments; in Silves and Monchique, they stay in villas with gardens and a
private swimming pool.
5. Method of analysis
In terms of methodology, studies have constructed quantitative indicators of sense of place
(Jorgensen and Stedman, 2006), relied on narrative analysis using in-depth interviews or
diaries (Tuulentie, 2007), or explored brand ‘‘Netnography’’ by analysing ?rst-person online
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 367
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
stories (Woodside et al., 2007). Thus, the choice to use mainly a qualitative explorative
research design was in?uenced by the nature of the research objectives and fromthe need to
adopt a perspective that would not rely on a preconceived model, but rather on the analysis of
words, in some ways following in the footsteps of Ryan and Cave (2005), who collected and
analyzed qualitative data from conversations about Auckland’s image as a visitor destination.
The aim here is to rely on selecting and collecting freely expressed opinion of individuals to
understand how they relate to their elected place of holidaying. Our goal is to identify and
understand, through textual data fromonline reviews, the intangible and tangible experiences
associated with short-stay visits to speci?c place(s) in the Algarve and to ?ll a gap in the
literature, since it uses content and textual analysis of natural occurring data which were not
elicited through questionnaires, interviews or similar instruments of data collection. Therefore,
this study functions as an entry point in order to understand what these tourists are describing
and making salient in their online reviews. As such, this investigation relies on abductive and
iterative principles, moving recursively between theory and empirical data. The research
process is circular, iterative and relatively open-ended (Wodak, 2008).
By adopting a qualitative approach, thus interpreting the phenomenon in its natural setting
(Denzin and Lincoln, 2003, p. 5), our aimis to understand the meaning these tourists bring to
the places they visit, which means that more emphasis is placed on the ways in which the
reviews describe their experiences, and meanings relating to Silves, Monchique and
Albufeira, than on the truth values of the facts expressed. The goal is not to provide reliable
evidence about a large sample of data but rather to understand some of the ‘‘participants’
categories’’ (Silverman, 1993, p. 19), i.e. sense of place, and to see how these are used in
concrete activities such as reviewing online holiday destinations and accommodation.
Indeed, gathering an ‘‘authentic understanding’’ (Silverman, 1993, p. 10) of people’s
experiences rather than aiming at reliability is the issue at hand.
6. Analysis and ?ndings
This online community is able to help tourists choose their holiday house rental whilst sharing
their own impressions, which they accomplish by reviewing the house they have stayed in
after their holiday experience. The reviews make for a very speci?c and narrow textual
genre: each text is quite short (on average around 200 words); each reviewer, using a
?rst-person pronoun (I or we), focuses mainly on the house’s traits, amenities, fun and leisure
affordances (locale and close surroundings) and their travelling group’s (family or friends)
impressions. In terms of discourse, the language is simple, straightforward, free and
unrestrained, as the frequent typos and misspellings indicate. Therefore, these reviews are
not particularly oriented to presenting a broad picture of the visited place beyond the
accommodation, in contrast to the ?rst-person online stories analyzed by Woodside et al.
(2007). Moreover, the target audience of these reviews is potential future visitors who are
interested in very speci?c information relating to the accommodation itself. There is also a
high degree of the repetition and reformulation, in terms of set phrases and words, typical of
highly formatted textual genres, as is the case here.
As explained above, this study relies on a qualitative-explorative research methodology in
order to understand if and how these online testimonials post-holiday experience portray
sense of place. Applying the theoretical construct of sense of place to the data at hand
enables us to compare and contrast the web site’s positioning of this group of tourists as
‘‘travellers’’ with the group’s own positioning in terms of:
B geographic location;
B material form; and
B investment with meaning and value (Gieryn, 2000).
Because these are short-visit tourists, they may have a more ?nite and, it could be said, more
narrow construction of sense of place. However, Tuulentie (2007) suggests that being a
tourist may often involve seeking a close relationship with one speci?c place or region, and
PAGE 368
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
wanting to ‘‘go steady’’ with that place or region. Thus, visitors may, over time, transcend
their typical position and make a place or a region their regular haunt or even ‘‘home’’.
The ways in which OVR customers construct their own reviews depends on various variables:
textual and promotional genre (the aim is to get future rentals), online testimonials, and also
what we designate as affordances of place and a functional sense of place. These individuals,
whose testimonials are written voluntarily, construct these texts from a very pragmatic and
down-to-earth perspective. Accordingly, houses’ amenities, comforts, geographic location
and close surroundings are what stand out from these reviews. Another important theme is
how the houses’ hosts are mentioned quite frequently, pointing to an unexpected ?nding: out
of the 116 reviews analyzed, all hosts had what appeared to be English ?rst names and
surnames, thus indicating peer-to-peer rental whereby visitors seem to prefer to rent houses
from their own countrymen, instead of renting them from the local (Portuguese) people. This
?nding points to a strong need for af?liation, for being at ‘‘home away from home’’, thus
corroborating Thurlowand Jaworski’s (2010) research on tourismdiscourse and Larson et al.’s
(2006) ‘‘de-exoticizing tourism theory’’ and also contrary to what has usually been suggested
as the mythology – or ideology – of tourism traditionally being perceived as a way of
broadening the mind and coming to understand local people and their cultural ways.
The broad themes de?ned were as follows: affordances of place (landscape; leisure
activities); af?liation (tangible affordances of home and intangible affordances of home) and
recommendations to future visitors. The data do not reveal salient expressions of social
interaction between these tourists and the local community, nor do they reveal any
references to the (local) cultural context, which are the usual dimensions explored in sense
of place studies (Kianicka et al., 2006).
The landscape subtheme encompassed references to natural or man-made surroundings
which, geographically, go beyond the house and its immediate grounds. References to
activities such as walking, ?shing, music, restaurants, cycling, swimming, etc. were
classi?ed as leisure activities. Within this category, it is possible to understand how the
hedonistic quality of holidaying is a major theme in these reviews, thus ‘‘relaxing’’ and the
affordances of leisure activities to this end, as motivation for travel, are indeed very important
for this group of tourists. Another important theme is the af?liation dimension, which is
constructed as a general feeling of familiarity, security and safety, and bonding. Statements
by these individuals declaring that they ‘‘did not wish to leave’’ are also an important
construal of sense of place, as observed by Relph (1976), Altman and Low (1992), Williams
et al. (1992) and Brocato (2006). This theme is present in extracts stating that it had been ‘‘a
real home away from home’’.
Within the af?liation dimension, three subtypes of descriptions are identi?ed:
1. Global af?liation, characterized by feelings and shared emotions, which are not directly
associated in terms of linguistic properties to the property/location/town, but are related
to the overall experience. These include expressions such as ‘‘comfort’’ and also
references to property-owners who are mentioned as providing a sense of familiarity and
an (English) home (away) ‘‘from home’’.
2. References to house amenities and quali?ers of a general ‘‘sense of home’’ were
accounted for by the dimensions of ‘‘intangible affordances of home’’ relating to the
house’s (emotional and sensorial) affordances, but these were not associated with
objects or equipment.
3. ‘‘Tangible affordances of home’’ derived fromthe property’s facilities, e.g. size of the pool,
number of bedrooms, type of equipment and furniture available within and outside the
house, among others (Table I).
Finally, the last theme considered is linked to recommendations: past, future, as well as the
declared intention of visiting the place again. It is possible to conclude that these reviews are
a fundamental instrument by which customers choose their accommodation, based on a
mechanism to increase site ‘‘stickiness’’ (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010), and at the same time
create an information product (with descriptions, photographs and testimonials). Table I
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 369
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
comprises a summary of dimensions and illustrates them with a few extracts on the two
geographic locations under analysis.
One important ?nding is the lack of salient differences in the online reviews in terms of
discursive strategies when writing about the two geographic locations. Tourists staying in
both locations highlight the same topics or themes characteristic of this textual genre (house
amenities, surroundings, walking/car mobility, hosts’ friendliness, etc.). Comparisons
between the two locations using a corpus linguistic analytical tool – software
programWordSmith 3.0 (Scott, 1999) – did not reveal major differences in terms of
keywords or top 100 lexical words. After building the initial wordlists for each sub-corpus, the
two sub-corpora were again compared. Keeping in mind that the study’s goal was to
understand how these groups of tourists write about their experience in the Algarve, a
selection of the most signi?cant keywords indicating affect and emotion was listed, as
illustrated in Table II.
However, the inland references were richer and more diverse, indicating that, and drawing
from Relph (2000), these could tentatively point to ‘‘multiple meanings’’. Contrary to the
Albufeira reviews which only mentioned ‘‘the Albufeira beach’’, for Silves and Monchique the
surrounding place discursive construction was based on predication, such as ‘‘beautiful
views’’, ‘‘mountains breeze’’, ‘‘orange groves’’, ‘‘rural environmental’’, ‘‘unspoilt area of the
Algarve’’; indeed these visitors seemed to blend their own imaginary construction of the
Table I Dimensions and some extracts
Silves and Monchique (inland) Albufeira town (coast)
Landscape
‘‘Stunning countryside’’ S21 ‘‘[. . .] walking distance to beach’’ A03
‘‘Beautiful little valley with the scents and sounds of another world in
another time’’ S54
‘‘The ?sherman’s beach was exemplary with the sand ?ne and
clean’’ A06
Leisure activities
‘‘Lovely walking and cycling country. And the beaches are only
about 20min away’’. S27
‘‘It’s located a few steps from the beach and a street with lots of
restaurants and shops’’ A07
‘‘[. . .] such a secluded location the restaurant within walking
distance was a bonus’’ S53
‘‘The location is great and ideal for families [. . .] plenty of shops,
bars, restaurants and entertainment’’. A15
Global af?liation
‘‘[. . .] from the moment you arrive and ?nd you are welcome’’ S04 ‘‘Overall all this was a great holiday which was relaxing due to the
comfort of the apartment, the smooth co-ordination by Tracey’’ A04
‘‘Simply superb value for a winter break. ’’S06 ‘‘We found our way around easily and walked everywhere’’ A08
‘‘We arrived at Silves about tea time greeted by Pat the owner’’ S09 ‘‘The whole holiday experience was fantastic with the least stress I
have encountered on a holiday’’ A06
‘‘The owners Angela and Cor were really friendly and made our stay
very enjoyable. They helped out with transport for shopping and
even a visit to the hospital, and gave us lots of advice about the best
attractions’’ S15
‘‘We didn’t want to leave’’ S56
Af?liation: sense of home tangibles (affordances of home tangible)
‘‘[. . .] the house was spotless, everything was provided and the
pool and the views were stunning’’ S31
‘‘A real home away from home’’ S44 ‘‘Apartment: spotlessly clean, well equipped, comfortable and
tastefully decorated.’’ A03
‘‘Clean, secure, spacious and very well equipped’’. A17
Af?liation: sense of home intangibles (affordances of home intangible)
‘‘We found the experience at Casa do Pinheiro to be fantastic and
soothing for the soul’’ S16
‘‘We had a very relaxing time in Albufeira’’ A08
‘‘Peace and quiet away from the hubbub of the coast’’ S20 ‘‘Apartment: comfortable and tastefully decorated’’ A01
‘‘Inside Casa Rosa has a ‘lived in’ homely feel’’ S49 ‘‘[. . .] there is everything you could possibly need it’s so clean the
maid service was also 1st class a lovely lady’’ A11
Note: Each review was ascribed a code number, making a total of 58 reviews for each destination, thus the code number at the end of
each extract indicates the place of the review, ‘‘S’’ – Silves and Monchique and ‘‘A’’ – Albufeira, plus the review number
PAGE 370
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
holidaying place with their real experience. Moreover, the Silves and Monchique reviews
made ample references to other local geographic places of interest worth visiting, such as
Burgau and Monte Cle´ rigo (small beaches, approx. 30 kmaway), Bordeira, Odeceixe, Silves
and Monchique towns. These references were accompanied by descriptions of the physical
(tangible), sensorial (intangible) and aesthetic features of the places.
7. Conclusions and future research
The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether qualitative indicators of sense of
place could be identi?ed in tourists’ reviews of OVRs. To achieve this goal we devised four
main RQs to which answers are provided below:
B Sense of place is constructed through affordances of place, home and a functional sense
of place. Accordingly, a property’s amenities, comforts, geographic location and close
surroundings are the most salient traits. The body of analysis was limited to visitors’
reviews of house amenities, which are the main goal of the web site; therefore, description
of the material characteristics of a property prevails. Thus, these reviews are not meant to
re?ect the visitors’ broad sense of place directly.
B Overall, these reviews do not differ across product types: their structure is very similar
whether a villa or an apartment is being described. The data neither reveal salient
expression of social interaction between these tourists and the local community nor
express any references to cultural context. As such, the continuum of familiarity never
seems to mutate into unfamiliar ground, since the reviews reproduce and recommend
what their hosts have previously recommended (food, restaurants, places to visit, etc.).
B Similarities are more salient than differences: the dimensions analyzed show the same
overall patterns, which again seem to be determined by the genre. However, the inland
references are richer and more diverse, possibly indicating a less narrow sense of place
and more interaction with the affordances of the local place; these tend to go beyond the
villa or apartment and immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, references to this broader
sense of place are infrequent and consistently limited, pointing again to the absence of
any travel-to-learn motivation.
This study was designed as an exploratory qualitative pilot analysis of a fairly new and
speci?c online channel in order to tease out possible patterns and open the way to
understanding this type of (new) tourism. The innovative design of this research may be
somewhat skewed by its very focus on assessing tourists’ reviews. However, in many ways,
this study challenges the traditional distinction between home and away, as these travellers
sought a sense of familiarity and an (English) home (away) ‘‘from home’’. There are
recognizable issues arising from a qualitative approach concerning validity and bias of
results; as such, these ?ndings are not applicable to other contexts or tourist destinations,
Table II Lexical keywords: Albufeira and Monchique vs Silves
Region Grammatical category Lexical words
Silves and Monchique Nouns (toponyms) Silves, Monchique
Nouns Casa, drive, coast, villa, pool, house, views, area, fun,
bungalow, terrace, villa, fruit, group, September, cottage,
games, castle
Quali?ers (adjectives and adverbs) Large, peaceful, beautiful, lovely, secluded, gorgeous,
fabulous, open
Verbs Enjoyed; relax; sitting
Albufeira Nouns (toponyms) Albufeira, Andrew, Tracy
Nouns Apartment, town, beach, airport, families, transfers, strip,
questions, euros, road
Quali?ers (adjectives and adverbs) Old, new, nice
Verbs Arranged, walk, rent, met
Note: p , 0.01
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 371
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
although the methodology applied might open useful future lines of research. The ?ndings
point to the strong possibility that these reviews are the result of a closed-in virtual
community, i.e. although the site is open to all, it is primarily used by British-to-British. This
research also shows the strength of virtual networking, on which these tourists rely to
construct their sense of place. Thus, further triangulation of data and methods is needed,
e.g. investigating postings about an urban centre or reviews from other web sites originated
in other countries, or applying a Netnography methodology (Kozinets, 2010). Such future
research may contribute to counterbalancing bias, as well as helping to verify and validate
claims (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003), namely how close-knit these virtual communities are,
contrary to our prior expectations when we assumed that ‘‘tourists seemed to be particularly
satis?ed if they established friendly relationships with [locals]’’ (Kianicka et al., 2006). At this
stage, it remains unclear if the narrow sense of place de?ned here is the outcome of the
limitations induced by the channel and textual genre or if these tourists (even though
positioned as travellers by HomeAway Holiday-Rentals) do not wish to broaden their
experience to a larger/wider sense of place. Future research on this virtual community,
involving interviews and questionnaires, could clarify this question. Finally, as this paper
shows, investigating online reviews written by travellers and/or tourists opens new paths for
both researchers and practitioners seeking to understand the multifarious phenomenon of
tourism.
References
A
´
guas, P. and Melo, C. (1997), ‘‘Estudo do per?l do turista do Algarve: via ae´ rea – e´ poca alta 1995’’,
Dos Algarves, No. 2, pp. 25-30.
Almeida, C. (2010), Aeroportos e turismo residencial. Do conhecimento a` s estrate´ gias, Editorial
Novembro, Pena?el.
Altman, I. and Low, S. (1992), Place Attachment, Plenum Press, New York, NY.
ANA (2008), Relato´ rio anual de tra´ fego Ana, Aeroportos de Portugal – Aeroporto de Faro.
Ba, S. and Pavlou, P.A. (2002), ‘‘Evidence of the effect of trust building technology in electronic markets:
price premiums and buyer behavior’’, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 26 No. 3, pp. 243-268.
Baker, C.W., Kingdon, F., Gill, R., Leveritt, J., Cvjetkovic, J. and Chambers, S. (2009), ‘‘Market
snapshot.uk second homes overseas, 2009’’, Savills International Research Rentals, available at: www.
holiday-rentals.co.uk/info/press/press-kit
Brocato, E.D. (2006), ‘‘Place attachment: an investigation of environments and outcomes in service
context’’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Texas, Arlington, TX.
Buhalis, D. and Law, R. (2008), ‘‘Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years
on and 10 years after the internet – the state of e-tourismresearch’’, TourismManagement, Vol. 29 No. 4,
pp. 609-623.
Cheng, Y. and Xie, J. (2005), ‘‘Third-party product review and ?rm marketing strategy’’, Marketing
Science, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 218-240.
Chevalier, J. and Mayzlin, D. (2006), ‘‘The effect of word-of-mouth on sales: online book reviews’’,
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 345-354.
Cresswell, T. (2006), ‘‘Place’’, Encyclopedia of Human Geography, (electronic version), available at:
www.sageereference.com/humangeography/Article_n220.html (accessed 20 February 2012).
Davenport, M.A. and Anderson, D.H. (2005), ‘‘Getting fromsense of place to place-based management:
an interpretive investigation of place meanings and perceptions of landscape change’’, Society and
Natural Resources, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 625-641.
Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds) (2003), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, Sage,
London.
Gibson, J.J. (1986/1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates,
Hillsdale, NJ, (original work published 1979).
PAGE 372
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
Gieryn, T. (2000), ‘‘A space for place in sociology’’, Annual Reviews of Sociology, Vol. 26 No. 1,
pp. 463-496.
Gretzel, U. and Fesenmaier, D.R. (2006), ‘‘Persuasion in recommendation systems’’, International
Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 81-100.
Halpenny, E.A. (2006), ‘‘Environmental behavior, place attachment and park visitation: a case study of
visitors to Point Pelee National Park’’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Waterloo, Waterloo.
HomeAway.co.uk (2009), available at: www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/info/owner-resources/owners-
product-guides/guest-reviews (accessed 1 August 2011).
Jorgensen, B.S. and Stedman, R. (2006), ‘‘A comparative analysis of predictors of sense of place
dimensions: attachment to, dependence on, and identi?cation with lakeshore properties’’, Journal of
Environmental Management, Vol. 79, pp. 316-327.
Kianicka, S., Buchecker, M., Hunziker, N. and Mu¨ ller-Bo¨ ker, U. (2006), ‘‘Locals’ and tourists’ sense of
place: a case study in a Swiss Alpine village’’, Journal of Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 26
No. 1, pp. 55-63.
Kozinets, R.V. (2010), ‘‘Netnography: the marketer’s secret weapon, netnography White Paper in
Portuguese’’, available at:http://kozinets.net/archives/416/netnography-white-paper-in-portuguese
(accessed 12 January 2011).
Kumar, N. and Benbasat, I. (2006), ‘‘The in?uence of recommendations and consumer reviews on
evaluations of websites’’, Information Systems Research, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 425-439.
Kyle, G. and Chick, G. (2007), ‘‘The social construction of a sense of place’’, Leisure Sciences, Vol. 29
No. 3, pp. 209-225.
Larsen, J., Urry, J. and Axhausen, K.W. (2007), ‘‘Networks and tourism mobile social life’’, Annals of
Tourism Research, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 244-262.
Litvin, S.W., Goldsmith, R.E. and Pan, B. (2008), ‘‘Electronic word-of-mouth in hospitality and tourism
management’’, Tourism Management, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 458-468.
Mudambi, S. and Schuff, D. (2010), ‘‘What makes a helpful online review? A study of customer reviews
on amazon.com’’, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 185-200.
Proshansky, H.M., Fabian, A.K. and Kaminoff, R. (1983), ‘‘Place identity: physical world and socialization
of the self’’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 57-83.
Relph, E. (1976), Place and Placelessness, Pion, London.
Relph, E. (2000), ‘‘Author’s response: Place and Placelessness in a new context (classics in Human
Geography revisited, Place and Placelessness)’’, Human Geography, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 613-619.
Ryan, C. and Cave, J. (2005), ‘‘Structuring destination image: a qualitative approach’’, Journal of Travel
Research, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 143-150.
Scott, M. (1999), WordSmith Tools Version 3.0, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Seamon, D. (1979), A Geography of the Life World: Movement, Rest and Encounter, Croom Helm,
London, (electronic version), available at: www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/books_intro.htm (accessed
5 February 2011).
Sen, S. and Lerman, D. (2007), ‘‘Why are you telling me this? An examination into negative consumer
reviews on the web’’, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 76-94.
Senecal, S. and Nantel, J. (2004), ‘‘The in?uence of online product recommendations on consumers’
online choices’’, Journal of Retailing, Vol. 80 No. 2, pp. 159-169.
Silverman, D. (1993), Interpreting Qualitative Data, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Sparks, B. and Browning, V. (2011), ‘‘The impact of online reviews on hotel booking intentions and
perceptions of trust’’, Tourism Management, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 1310-1323.
Stedman, R.C. (2003), ‘‘Is it really just a social construction? The contribution of the physical
environment to sense of place’’, Society and Natural Resources, Vol. 16 No. 8, pp. 671-685.
Stokols, D. and Shumaker, S.A. (1981), ‘‘People in places: a transactional view of settings’’, in Harvey, J.
(Ed.), Cognition, Social Behavior, and the Environment, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 85-125.
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 373
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
Thurlow, C. and Jaworski, A. (2010), Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility, Palgrave
Macmillan, London.
Torkington, K. (2011), ‘‘The discursive construction of place-identity: British lifestyle migrants in the
Algarve’’, unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University, Lancaster.
Tuan, Y.F. (1980), ‘‘Rootedness versus sense of place’’, Landscape, Vol. 24, pp. 3-8.
Tuulentie, S. (2007), ‘‘Settled tourists: second homes as a part of tourist life stories’’, Scandinavian
Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 281-300.
Urry, J. (1995), Consuming Places, Sage, London.
Williams, D.R., Patterson, M.E., Roggenbuck, J.W. and Watson, A.E. (1992), ‘‘Beyond the commodity
metaphor: examining emotional and symbolic attachment to place’’, Leisure Sciences, Vol. 14 No. 1,
pp. 29-46.
Wodak, R. (2008), ‘‘Introduction: discourse studies – important concepts and terms’’, in Wodak, R. and
Krzyz?anowski, M. (Eds), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences, Palgrave Macmillan, New
York, NY, pp. 1-29.
Woodside, G.A., Cruickshank, F.B. and Dehuang, N. (2007), ‘‘Stories visitors tell about Italian cities as
destination icons’’, Tourism Management, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 162-174.
Xiang, Z. and Gretzel, U. (2010), ‘‘Role of social media in online travel information search’’, Tourism
Management, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 179-188.
Further reading
Kohli, R., Devaraj, S. and Mahmood, M.A. (2004), ‘‘Understanding determinants of online consumer
satisfaction: a decision process perspective’’, Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 2 No. 1,
pp. 115-135.
Tuan, Y.F. (1977), Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, MN.
About the authors
Joana Afonso Dias is a PhD student at Huelva University (Spain). She is interested in
e-tourism and in the impacts of information and technology on the management of tourism
and its implications for strategic management, such as virtual tourism and golf. She is
currently investigating consumer behavior theories on tourism and social interaction. Joana
Afonso Dias is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]
Filipa Perdiga˜ o Ribeiro holds a PhD in applied linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA),
from Lancaster University (UK). She has published some articles on the discursive
construction of national identity and she is currently interested in investigating tourism using
language and communication approaches. She is a Lecturer at ESGHT, University of the
Algarve where she teaches a variety of language courses.
Anto´ nia Correia is an Assistant Professor with aggregation at University of the Algarve. Her
current research interests are concerned with the application of consumer behaviour
theories to Tourism, with particular relevance to the issues associated with psycho-social
variables that in?uence the choice/decision, the external factors that affect consumer
behaviour and its social interactions, risk and uncertainty in consumer behaviour and
models of destinations choice, motivations and satisfaction, product/destination image,
virtual tourism and golf. She has published in leading journals such as Annals of Tourism
Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, among others.
PAGE 374
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected]
Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
This article has been cited by:
1. Joana Afonso Dias, Antónia Correia, Francisco José Martínez López. 2015. The meaning of rental second homes and places:
the owners’ perspectives. Tourism Geographies 1-18. [CrossRef]
2. Joana Afonso Dias, Antónia Correia, Francisco José Martínez López. 2014. From information-sharing to vacation rental
choices – the case of Albufeira, Portugal. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 8:1, 35-47.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
doc_650663203.pdf
This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of online vacation rentals (OVRs) (a new source of
e-business travel growth) and how the concept of sense of place is presented by tourists’ online reviews.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Online reviews of short-term visits: exploring sense of place
J oana Afonso Dias Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro Antónia Correia
Article information:
To cite this document:
J oana Afonso Dias Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro Antónia Correia , (2013),"Online reviews of short-term visits: exploring sense of place",
International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7 Iss 4 pp. 364 - 374
Permanent link to this document:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJ CTHR-02-2012-0006
Downloaded on: 24 January 2016, At: 22:23 (PT)
References: this document contains references to 49 other documents.
To copy this document: [email protected]
The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 391 times since 2013*
Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:
Peter De Maeyer, (2012),"Impact of online consumer reviews on sales and price strategies: a review and directions for future research",
J ournal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 21 Iss 2 pp. 132-139http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10610421211215599
Eleonora Pantano, Loredana Di Pietro, (2013),"From e-tourism to f-tourism: emerging issues from negative tourists' online reviews", J ournal
of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, Vol. 4 Iss 3 pp. 211-227http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/J HTT-02-2013-0005
Hua-Ning Chen, Chun-Yao Huang, (2013),"An investigation into online reviewers' behavior", European J ournal of Marketing, Vol. 47 Iss 10
pp. 1758-1773http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EJ M-11-2011-0625
Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:115632 []
For Authors
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about
how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/
authors for more information.
About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com
Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than
290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional
customer resources and services.
Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and
also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.
*Related content and download information correct at time of download.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
Online reviews of short-term visits:
exploring sense of place
Joana Afonso Dias, Filipa Perdiga˜ o Ribeiro and Anto´ nia Correia
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of online vacation rentals (OVRs) (a newsource of
e-business travel growth) and how the concept of sense of place is presented by tourists’ online reviews.
Design/methodology/approach – The initial assumption for this exploratory study is that OVRs bring
both material and intangible advantages to the individual consumer and to the community of
homeowners. Using a qualitative approach, within the conceptual framework of a sense of place,
multidimensional meanings presented by tourists’ online reviews of their travel experience and home
rentals were explored.
Findings – The ?ndings point to a sense of place constructed through affordances of place, home and
a functional sense of place. They seem to indicate that these testimonials come from a close-knit virtual
community; although the site is open to all, it is primarily used by British-to-British. The data reveal
neither any salient expression of social interaction between these tourists and the local community nor
any references to the cultural context, thus pointing to the dimensions of security and familiarity and to
the absence of any travelling-to-learn motivation.
Research limitations/implications – It remains unclear whether sense of place, as de?ned here, is the
outcome of the limitations induced by the channel and textual genre. Future research on this virtual
community, via interviews and questionnaires, could clarify this question.
Originality/value – The analysis of this new form of tourism and the innovative design of this research,
based on textual analysis of free elicited data, are the main contributions of this paper.
Keywords Online reviews, Online vacation rentals, Qualitative approach, Sense of place
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The increasing signi?cance of online reviews for all kinds of consumption decisions implies a
need for a better understanding of their in?uence within the tourism context. Inarguably,
consumers rely more than ever on online search strategies, using blog pages, forums and
review sites when making product decisions (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). The internet has
reshaped the way tourism-related information is distributed and the way people plan for and
consume travel (Buhalis and Law, 2008). Online vacation rentals (OVRs) are a new market
segment of online travel’s ‘‘long tail’’ and a newsource of e-business travel growth. HomeAway
Holiday-Rentals UK provides an interesting example of this scenario, as it offers a holiday
rental marketplace for both private property owners to display their properties and potential
guests to choose their accommodation and contact property owners. Through this web site,
homeowners publicize their properties by postingphotographs andbrief descriptions of them.
After holidaying at a property, travellers may voluntarily post short online reviews about their
accommodation and overall holiday experience. The rental process and amounts paid
proceed on a private individual basis between owner and customer. These testimonials have
the potential to in?uence substantial numbers of future consumers of this type of
accommodation; for instance, the leader among OVR companies – HomeAway (2011) –
represents the owners of over 540,000 holiday rental homes in 145 countries.
PAGE 364
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013, pp. 364-374, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182 DOI 10.1108/IJCTHR-02-2012-0006
Joana Afonso Dias is based
in the Department of
Management and
Marketing, INUAF –
Instituto Superior Afonso III,
Loule´ , Portugal.
Filipa Perdiga˜ o Ribeiro is
based at CECL, School of
Management, Hospitality
and Tourism, University of
the Algarve, Faro, Portugal.
Anto´ nia Correia is based at
CEFAGE, Faculty of
Economy, University of the
Algarve, Faro, Portugal.
Received 15 February 2012
Revised 29 March 2012
Accepted 17 April 2012
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
This study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of OVRs by analyzing how tourists’
testimonials, in online reviews, describe their holiday experience in the Algarve (South of
Portugal), and in particular how sense of place comes across. Within this region, two
different settings were chosen – inland and coastline – from which the two most popular
municipalities were selected, amounting to a total of 116 reviews collected from HomeAway.
co.uk. This study started from the assumption that these travellers were typically on ‘‘an
escape from the ordinary and on a quest for more desirable and ful?lling places’’ (Urry,
1995). However, in 2007, Larsen et al. (2007, p. 246) presented a critique of this theory
which, according to the authors, entailed ‘‘rather ?xed dualisms: away as opposed to home,
authenticity as opposed to inauthenticity, the extraordinary as opposed to the ordinary and
guests as opposed to host’’. Thus, the authors ‘‘de-exoticize tourism theory’’ or, in other
words, claim that tourism practices today lean towards being ‘‘home away from home’’. The
tourism-as-an-escape theory, which entailed ‘‘moments of the ‘tourist gaze’’’ (Larsen et al.,
2007, p. 246), seemed initially to indicate that the group of travellers who use OVRs are
looking for closer contact (social relationships) with the local community (Kianicka et al.,
2006), which is one of the categories relevant to the concept of sense of place (Stedman,
2003). Thus, the purpose of this investigation is to determine whether qualitative indicators of
a sense of place can be identi?ed in travellers’ reviews of OVRs. The presence of customer
reviews on a web site has been shown to improve customers’ perceptions of the usefulness
of this medium (Kumar and Benbasat, 2006). It is also widely recognized that word-of-mouth
(WOM), both positive and negative, has the potential to in?uence customer purchasing
decisions (Sparks and Browning, 2011). Thus, the research questions that guide the online
reviews analysis are as follows:
RQ1. Howdo these tourists construct their sense of place (i.e. meanings) with regard to
their elective place for holidaying?
RQ2. How do these tourists appear to interact with the local community and local
place(s)?
RQ3. Are there differences between tourists who choose to stay in Albufeira (coastal
town, known for its nightlife and entertainment) and those who stay in the more
secluded and rural area of Silves town and its surroundings?
And ?nally, a more general question is:
RQ4. What are these tourists seeking when they choose this particular way of
holidaying?
2. Sense of place and affordances of place
Undisputably, there is no single theory of sense of place. Rather, it is understood in many
different ways within the academic literature. In human geography, sense of place is a term
used to encompass all the subjective meanings that become attached in some way to a
place (Cresswell, 2006). Thus, when people talk about places, they may well project myriad
meanings that arise from their experiences, senses and feelings (Torkington, 2011, p. 43).
The humanist geographer Tuan (1980) introduced a broad de?nition of the concept ‘‘sense
of place’’, which amalgamated the meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings of
individuals or groups. His de?nition also included awareness about a place and attributes
that differentiate it from other places. At the same time, the construct of place attachment
emerged as an umbrella concept encompassing place relations as diverse as ‘‘at
homeness’’ (Seamon, 1979), ‘‘place dependence’’ (Williams et al., 1992), and even ‘‘place
identity’’ (Proshansky et al., 1983).
Nowadays, the literature considers sense of place to be the meaning and emotion humans
assign to geographic spaces (Stedman, 2003). Importantly, sense of place is not a static
concept, it changes in response to in?uences inside and outside communities and this
change of meaning also results from individuals’ life experience (Davenport and Anderson,
2005; Kianicka et al., 2006). Historic, cultural, social, ecological and also physical attributes
may all contribute to the creation of place meanings; therefore, the present study assumes
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 365
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
sense of place to be socially constructed (Kyle and Chick, 2007, p. 222). At the same time,
and even for ?rst-time visitors to a destination, Halpenny (2006) claims that a sense of place
attachment may have been formed prior to their ?rst visit. This could be based on stories
about the destination from friends and family, or the mass media, such as TV shows. Our
research seems to indicate that a prior sense of place attachment could also be based on
online reviews of the place/house chosen for a future visit.
According to the social sciences (Gieryn, 2000, p. 465), place has at least three fundamental
features:
1. geographic location (a place is a unique spot in the universe);
2. material form (a place has physicality); and
3. investment in meaning and value (i.e. without naming through toponyms, identifying or
representing, a place is not a place).
This last feature is of particular interest to us, as it conceptualizes places as doubly
constructed: they ‘‘are built or in some way physically carved out’’ but they are also
‘‘interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood and imagined’’ (Soja, 1996 in Gieryn,
2000, p. 465).
Thus, this research draws on several conceptualizations of sense of place: ‘‘place
attachment’’ which refers to the phenomenon of human-place bonding, usually described as
the positive bond that develops between groups or individuals and their environment
(Altman and Low, 1992; Brocato, 2006; Relph, 1976; Williams et al., 1992); ‘‘place identity’’
which is a substructure of a more global self-identi?cation; and ‘‘place dependence’’ as an
occupant’s perceived strength of association between him or herself and speci?c places
(Stokols and Shumaker, 1981).
Therefore, following in the footsteps of social scientists such as Gieryn (2000) and Tuulentie
(2007), this investigation argues that a place is remarkable because it is a compound of
material formand interpretative understandings or experiences. This study operationalises a
simpli?ed version of sense of place by applying categories which, when combined, may
indicate the sense of place textually constructed in online reviews by the group of tourists
under observation. As mentioned earlier, although sense of place entails the collection of
meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings that individuals or groups associate with a
particular location, the textual data collected point to what appears to be a functional and
restricted sense of place. Thus, we propose to explore the following salient dimensions of
sense of place: physical characteristics of the environment, their affect and meaning, and
the activities afforded by the place (the concept of ‘‘affordances of place’’ was ?rst
described by the perceptual psychologist Gibson (1986/1979) as being ‘‘neutral’’, since it
consists of all the action possibilities perceived in a particular environment); in practice,
however, affordances of place are drawn upon in discourse as positive evaluation strategies
(Torkington, 2011, p. 139) and the social interactions associated with a place.
3. Online communities and online reviews
In answer to the increasing consumer demand for unbiased travel information, the so-called
tourism ‘‘eMediaries’’ provide online reviews of hotels at popular travel destinations
(e.g. www.tripadvisor.com). Studies have explored the issue of online reviews, or electronic
WOM, focusing mainly on matters such as the motivation for, and the social dynamics
between, users of and contributors to review sites. Past research has broadly analyzed the
role of online recommendation systems (Chen et al., 2004; Gretzel and Fesenmaier, 2006),
the role of expert reviews (Cheng and Xie, 2005) and the positive effect feedback
mechanisms can have on buyer trust (Ba and Pavlou, 2002). Although our aim is not to
investigate online reviews’ impact on consumer decision-making, as Chevalier and Mayzlin
(2006) and Sen and Lerman (2007) have done, the effect of these reviews on consumer
decisions is reported to be powerful. HomeAway.co.uk (2009) states that ‘‘reviews frompast
guests are one of the most important parts’’ of their product. This being true, travellers
actively research reviews before making an enquiry, and data show ‘‘that properties with just
PAGE 366
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
3 reviews receive on average 23 percent more enquires than those with no reviews’’
(HomeAway Holiday-Rentals co.uk). Moreover, the more positive feedback that houses get
from renters, the more the advert will be viewed and, as a consequence, the more
reservation requests, i.e. as a peer-to-peer relationship – the owner will receive.
Interpersonal in?uence and WOMare ranked the most important information sources when a
consumer is making a purchasing decision. Such in?uence may be especially important in
the hospitality and tourism industry, as its intangible products are dif?cult to evaluate prior to
consumption (Litvin et al., 2008). One aspect of cyberspace is the phenomenon of online
interpersonal in?uence (Senecal and Nantel, 2004). Online customer reviews can be de?ned
as peer-generated product evaluations posted on company or third-party web sites. This
background explains how sense of place begins to take formwell before tourists actually set
foot in the Algarve. Thus, and following Urry’s (1995) earlier conceptualization, one could say
that the would-be-tourist’s gaze is directed by anticipation, by the promotional narratives of
the tourism industry, and by cultural stereotypes and expectations.
4. Contextual setting
The textual corpus consists of 116 online reviews (14,875 words in total) selected according
to the most frequent and most recent criteria. The salient dimensions explored in these online
reviews are the physical characteristics of the place environment, the affect and meaning
attributed to place, the activities afforded by the place, and the social interactions
associated with the place.
The Algarve, in Southern Portugal, is one of the most popular tourist regions in Europe. It is
home to a population of around 400,000 citizens and attracts approximately 5,000,000
tourists every year. At 44 percent of all overseas guests, UK visitors make up the key tourism
source market of the Algarve, of which 50 percent are hosted in apartments or friends’
houses (A
´
guas and Melo, 1997), followed by those from Spain, Germany and The
Netherlands (ANA, 2008). According to Baker et al.’s (2009, p. 4) report, half of UK overseas
home-owners bought properties in coastal locations over recent decades. Moreover,
Almeida (2010) shows that of those who stated they bought a house in the Algarve, 21
percent bought it directly from their previous owner, 18 percent directly from friends and 48
percent used an estate agent. The present study focuses on short-term house rentals and
the data sample reveals that UK online tourists choose accommodation owned and posted
on the web site by English native speakers solely, as the adverts are signed with British
names and are associated with UK phone numbers. This fact, although not generalizable to
all the houses available in the Algarve on the HomeAway Holiday-Rentals web site, seems to
point to a consistent pattern: these tourists choose familiar ground, thus highlighting the
dimensions of security and familiarity, and valuing networking rather than learning.
The analysis is based on a convenience sample of tourists’ postings collected from the web
site HomeAway Holiday Rentals (www.holiday-rentals.co.uk). Using a qualitative explorative
approach to the textual data, the postings were analyzed in order to understand how and
why tourists represent their own sense of place in terms of the Algarve and/or village where
they stayed, and whether a sense of place is present in their testimonials. A comparison
between two different locations – both situated in the tourist region of the Algarve: the
coastal town of Albufeira (58 reviews posted in 2008-2010: 8,518 words) and the inland
destinations Silves and Monchique (58 reviews posted in 2007-2010: 6,357 words) – was
also carried out to tease out patterns of similarity and/or difference, since the type of
accommodation available in these two sub-regions is different: in Albufeira, tourists mostly
stay in small apartments; in Silves and Monchique, they stay in villas with gardens and a
private swimming pool.
5. Method of analysis
In terms of methodology, studies have constructed quantitative indicators of sense of place
(Jorgensen and Stedman, 2006), relied on narrative analysis using in-depth interviews or
diaries (Tuulentie, 2007), or explored brand ‘‘Netnography’’ by analysing ?rst-person online
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 367
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
stories (Woodside et al., 2007). Thus, the choice to use mainly a qualitative explorative
research design was in?uenced by the nature of the research objectives and fromthe need to
adopt a perspective that would not rely on a preconceived model, but rather on the analysis of
words, in some ways following in the footsteps of Ryan and Cave (2005), who collected and
analyzed qualitative data from conversations about Auckland’s image as a visitor destination.
The aim here is to rely on selecting and collecting freely expressed opinion of individuals to
understand how they relate to their elected place of holidaying. Our goal is to identify and
understand, through textual data fromonline reviews, the intangible and tangible experiences
associated with short-stay visits to speci?c place(s) in the Algarve and to ?ll a gap in the
literature, since it uses content and textual analysis of natural occurring data which were not
elicited through questionnaires, interviews or similar instruments of data collection. Therefore,
this study functions as an entry point in order to understand what these tourists are describing
and making salient in their online reviews. As such, this investigation relies on abductive and
iterative principles, moving recursively between theory and empirical data. The research
process is circular, iterative and relatively open-ended (Wodak, 2008).
By adopting a qualitative approach, thus interpreting the phenomenon in its natural setting
(Denzin and Lincoln, 2003, p. 5), our aimis to understand the meaning these tourists bring to
the places they visit, which means that more emphasis is placed on the ways in which the
reviews describe their experiences, and meanings relating to Silves, Monchique and
Albufeira, than on the truth values of the facts expressed. The goal is not to provide reliable
evidence about a large sample of data but rather to understand some of the ‘‘participants’
categories’’ (Silverman, 1993, p. 19), i.e. sense of place, and to see how these are used in
concrete activities such as reviewing online holiday destinations and accommodation.
Indeed, gathering an ‘‘authentic understanding’’ (Silverman, 1993, p. 10) of people’s
experiences rather than aiming at reliability is the issue at hand.
6. Analysis and ?ndings
This online community is able to help tourists choose their holiday house rental whilst sharing
their own impressions, which they accomplish by reviewing the house they have stayed in
after their holiday experience. The reviews make for a very speci?c and narrow textual
genre: each text is quite short (on average around 200 words); each reviewer, using a
?rst-person pronoun (I or we), focuses mainly on the house’s traits, amenities, fun and leisure
affordances (locale and close surroundings) and their travelling group’s (family or friends)
impressions. In terms of discourse, the language is simple, straightforward, free and
unrestrained, as the frequent typos and misspellings indicate. Therefore, these reviews are
not particularly oriented to presenting a broad picture of the visited place beyond the
accommodation, in contrast to the ?rst-person online stories analyzed by Woodside et al.
(2007). Moreover, the target audience of these reviews is potential future visitors who are
interested in very speci?c information relating to the accommodation itself. There is also a
high degree of the repetition and reformulation, in terms of set phrases and words, typical of
highly formatted textual genres, as is the case here.
As explained above, this study relies on a qualitative-explorative research methodology in
order to understand if and how these online testimonials post-holiday experience portray
sense of place. Applying the theoretical construct of sense of place to the data at hand
enables us to compare and contrast the web site’s positioning of this group of tourists as
‘‘travellers’’ with the group’s own positioning in terms of:
B geographic location;
B material form; and
B investment with meaning and value (Gieryn, 2000).
Because these are short-visit tourists, they may have a more ?nite and, it could be said, more
narrow construction of sense of place. However, Tuulentie (2007) suggests that being a
tourist may often involve seeking a close relationship with one speci?c place or region, and
PAGE 368
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
wanting to ‘‘go steady’’ with that place or region. Thus, visitors may, over time, transcend
their typical position and make a place or a region their regular haunt or even ‘‘home’’.
The ways in which OVR customers construct their own reviews depends on various variables:
textual and promotional genre (the aim is to get future rentals), online testimonials, and also
what we designate as affordances of place and a functional sense of place. These individuals,
whose testimonials are written voluntarily, construct these texts from a very pragmatic and
down-to-earth perspective. Accordingly, houses’ amenities, comforts, geographic location
and close surroundings are what stand out from these reviews. Another important theme is
how the houses’ hosts are mentioned quite frequently, pointing to an unexpected ?nding: out
of the 116 reviews analyzed, all hosts had what appeared to be English ?rst names and
surnames, thus indicating peer-to-peer rental whereby visitors seem to prefer to rent houses
from their own countrymen, instead of renting them from the local (Portuguese) people. This
?nding points to a strong need for af?liation, for being at ‘‘home away from home’’, thus
corroborating Thurlowand Jaworski’s (2010) research on tourismdiscourse and Larson et al.’s
(2006) ‘‘de-exoticizing tourism theory’’ and also contrary to what has usually been suggested
as the mythology – or ideology – of tourism traditionally being perceived as a way of
broadening the mind and coming to understand local people and their cultural ways.
The broad themes de?ned were as follows: affordances of place (landscape; leisure
activities); af?liation (tangible affordances of home and intangible affordances of home) and
recommendations to future visitors. The data do not reveal salient expressions of social
interaction between these tourists and the local community, nor do they reveal any
references to the (local) cultural context, which are the usual dimensions explored in sense
of place studies (Kianicka et al., 2006).
The landscape subtheme encompassed references to natural or man-made surroundings
which, geographically, go beyond the house and its immediate grounds. References to
activities such as walking, ?shing, music, restaurants, cycling, swimming, etc. were
classi?ed as leisure activities. Within this category, it is possible to understand how the
hedonistic quality of holidaying is a major theme in these reviews, thus ‘‘relaxing’’ and the
affordances of leisure activities to this end, as motivation for travel, are indeed very important
for this group of tourists. Another important theme is the af?liation dimension, which is
constructed as a general feeling of familiarity, security and safety, and bonding. Statements
by these individuals declaring that they ‘‘did not wish to leave’’ are also an important
construal of sense of place, as observed by Relph (1976), Altman and Low (1992), Williams
et al. (1992) and Brocato (2006). This theme is present in extracts stating that it had been ‘‘a
real home away from home’’.
Within the af?liation dimension, three subtypes of descriptions are identi?ed:
1. Global af?liation, characterized by feelings and shared emotions, which are not directly
associated in terms of linguistic properties to the property/location/town, but are related
to the overall experience. These include expressions such as ‘‘comfort’’ and also
references to property-owners who are mentioned as providing a sense of familiarity and
an (English) home (away) ‘‘from home’’.
2. References to house amenities and quali?ers of a general ‘‘sense of home’’ were
accounted for by the dimensions of ‘‘intangible affordances of home’’ relating to the
house’s (emotional and sensorial) affordances, but these were not associated with
objects or equipment.
3. ‘‘Tangible affordances of home’’ derived fromthe property’s facilities, e.g. size of the pool,
number of bedrooms, type of equipment and furniture available within and outside the
house, among others (Table I).
Finally, the last theme considered is linked to recommendations: past, future, as well as the
declared intention of visiting the place again. It is possible to conclude that these reviews are
a fundamental instrument by which customers choose their accommodation, based on a
mechanism to increase site ‘‘stickiness’’ (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010), and at the same time
create an information product (with descriptions, photographs and testimonials). Table I
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 369
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
comprises a summary of dimensions and illustrates them with a few extracts on the two
geographic locations under analysis.
One important ?nding is the lack of salient differences in the online reviews in terms of
discursive strategies when writing about the two geographic locations. Tourists staying in
both locations highlight the same topics or themes characteristic of this textual genre (house
amenities, surroundings, walking/car mobility, hosts’ friendliness, etc.). Comparisons
between the two locations using a corpus linguistic analytical tool – software
programWordSmith 3.0 (Scott, 1999) – did not reveal major differences in terms of
keywords or top 100 lexical words. After building the initial wordlists for each sub-corpus, the
two sub-corpora were again compared. Keeping in mind that the study’s goal was to
understand how these groups of tourists write about their experience in the Algarve, a
selection of the most signi?cant keywords indicating affect and emotion was listed, as
illustrated in Table II.
However, the inland references were richer and more diverse, indicating that, and drawing
from Relph (2000), these could tentatively point to ‘‘multiple meanings’’. Contrary to the
Albufeira reviews which only mentioned ‘‘the Albufeira beach’’, for Silves and Monchique the
surrounding place discursive construction was based on predication, such as ‘‘beautiful
views’’, ‘‘mountains breeze’’, ‘‘orange groves’’, ‘‘rural environmental’’, ‘‘unspoilt area of the
Algarve’’; indeed these visitors seemed to blend their own imaginary construction of the
Table I Dimensions and some extracts
Silves and Monchique (inland) Albufeira town (coast)
Landscape
‘‘Stunning countryside’’ S21 ‘‘[. . .] walking distance to beach’’ A03
‘‘Beautiful little valley with the scents and sounds of another world in
another time’’ S54
‘‘The ?sherman’s beach was exemplary with the sand ?ne and
clean’’ A06
Leisure activities
‘‘Lovely walking and cycling country. And the beaches are only
about 20min away’’. S27
‘‘It’s located a few steps from the beach and a street with lots of
restaurants and shops’’ A07
‘‘[. . .] such a secluded location the restaurant within walking
distance was a bonus’’ S53
‘‘The location is great and ideal for families [. . .] plenty of shops,
bars, restaurants and entertainment’’. A15
Global af?liation
‘‘[. . .] from the moment you arrive and ?nd you are welcome’’ S04 ‘‘Overall all this was a great holiday which was relaxing due to the
comfort of the apartment, the smooth co-ordination by Tracey’’ A04
‘‘Simply superb value for a winter break. ’’S06 ‘‘We found our way around easily and walked everywhere’’ A08
‘‘We arrived at Silves about tea time greeted by Pat the owner’’ S09 ‘‘The whole holiday experience was fantastic with the least stress I
have encountered on a holiday’’ A06
‘‘The owners Angela and Cor were really friendly and made our stay
very enjoyable. They helped out with transport for shopping and
even a visit to the hospital, and gave us lots of advice about the best
attractions’’ S15
‘‘We didn’t want to leave’’ S56
Af?liation: sense of home tangibles (affordances of home tangible)
‘‘[. . .] the house was spotless, everything was provided and the
pool and the views were stunning’’ S31
‘‘A real home away from home’’ S44 ‘‘Apartment: spotlessly clean, well equipped, comfortable and
tastefully decorated.’’ A03
‘‘Clean, secure, spacious and very well equipped’’. A17
Af?liation: sense of home intangibles (affordances of home intangible)
‘‘We found the experience at Casa do Pinheiro to be fantastic and
soothing for the soul’’ S16
‘‘We had a very relaxing time in Albufeira’’ A08
‘‘Peace and quiet away from the hubbub of the coast’’ S20 ‘‘Apartment: comfortable and tastefully decorated’’ A01
‘‘Inside Casa Rosa has a ‘lived in’ homely feel’’ S49 ‘‘[. . .] there is everything you could possibly need it’s so clean the
maid service was also 1st class a lovely lady’’ A11
Note: Each review was ascribed a code number, making a total of 58 reviews for each destination, thus the code number at the end of
each extract indicates the place of the review, ‘‘S’’ – Silves and Monchique and ‘‘A’’ – Albufeira, plus the review number
PAGE 370
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
holidaying place with their real experience. Moreover, the Silves and Monchique reviews
made ample references to other local geographic places of interest worth visiting, such as
Burgau and Monte Cle´ rigo (small beaches, approx. 30 kmaway), Bordeira, Odeceixe, Silves
and Monchique towns. These references were accompanied by descriptions of the physical
(tangible), sensorial (intangible) and aesthetic features of the places.
7. Conclusions and future research
The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether qualitative indicators of sense of
place could be identi?ed in tourists’ reviews of OVRs. To achieve this goal we devised four
main RQs to which answers are provided below:
B Sense of place is constructed through affordances of place, home and a functional sense
of place. Accordingly, a property’s amenities, comforts, geographic location and close
surroundings are the most salient traits. The body of analysis was limited to visitors’
reviews of house amenities, which are the main goal of the web site; therefore, description
of the material characteristics of a property prevails. Thus, these reviews are not meant to
re?ect the visitors’ broad sense of place directly.
B Overall, these reviews do not differ across product types: their structure is very similar
whether a villa or an apartment is being described. The data neither reveal salient
expression of social interaction between these tourists and the local community nor
express any references to cultural context. As such, the continuum of familiarity never
seems to mutate into unfamiliar ground, since the reviews reproduce and recommend
what their hosts have previously recommended (food, restaurants, places to visit, etc.).
B Similarities are more salient than differences: the dimensions analyzed show the same
overall patterns, which again seem to be determined by the genre. However, the inland
references are richer and more diverse, possibly indicating a less narrow sense of place
and more interaction with the affordances of the local place; these tend to go beyond the
villa or apartment and immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, references to this broader
sense of place are infrequent and consistently limited, pointing again to the absence of
any travel-to-learn motivation.
This study was designed as an exploratory qualitative pilot analysis of a fairly new and
speci?c online channel in order to tease out possible patterns and open the way to
understanding this type of (new) tourism. The innovative design of this research may be
somewhat skewed by its very focus on assessing tourists’ reviews. However, in many ways,
this study challenges the traditional distinction between home and away, as these travellers
sought a sense of familiarity and an (English) home (away) ‘‘from home’’. There are
recognizable issues arising from a qualitative approach concerning validity and bias of
results; as such, these ?ndings are not applicable to other contexts or tourist destinations,
Table II Lexical keywords: Albufeira and Monchique vs Silves
Region Grammatical category Lexical words
Silves and Monchique Nouns (toponyms) Silves, Monchique
Nouns Casa, drive, coast, villa, pool, house, views, area, fun,
bungalow, terrace, villa, fruit, group, September, cottage,
games, castle
Quali?ers (adjectives and adverbs) Large, peaceful, beautiful, lovely, secluded, gorgeous,
fabulous, open
Verbs Enjoyed; relax; sitting
Albufeira Nouns (toponyms) Albufeira, Andrew, Tracy
Nouns Apartment, town, beach, airport, families, transfers, strip,
questions, euros, road
Quali?ers (adjectives and adverbs) Old, new, nice
Verbs Arranged, walk, rent, met
Note: p , 0.01
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 371
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
although the methodology applied might open useful future lines of research. The ?ndings
point to the strong possibility that these reviews are the result of a closed-in virtual
community, i.e. although the site is open to all, it is primarily used by British-to-British. This
research also shows the strength of virtual networking, on which these tourists rely to
construct their sense of place. Thus, further triangulation of data and methods is needed,
e.g. investigating postings about an urban centre or reviews from other web sites originated
in other countries, or applying a Netnography methodology (Kozinets, 2010). Such future
research may contribute to counterbalancing bias, as well as helping to verify and validate
claims (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003), namely how close-knit these virtual communities are,
contrary to our prior expectations when we assumed that ‘‘tourists seemed to be particularly
satis?ed if they established friendly relationships with [locals]’’ (Kianicka et al., 2006). At this
stage, it remains unclear if the narrow sense of place de?ned here is the outcome of the
limitations induced by the channel and textual genre or if these tourists (even though
positioned as travellers by HomeAway Holiday-Rentals) do not wish to broaden their
experience to a larger/wider sense of place. Future research on this virtual community,
involving interviews and questionnaires, could clarify this question. Finally, as this paper
shows, investigating online reviews written by travellers and/or tourists opens new paths for
both researchers and practitioners seeking to understand the multifarious phenomenon of
tourism.
References
A
´
guas, P. and Melo, C. (1997), ‘‘Estudo do per?l do turista do Algarve: via ae´ rea – e´ poca alta 1995’’,
Dos Algarves, No. 2, pp. 25-30.
Almeida, C. (2010), Aeroportos e turismo residencial. Do conhecimento a` s estrate´ gias, Editorial
Novembro, Pena?el.
Altman, I. and Low, S. (1992), Place Attachment, Plenum Press, New York, NY.
ANA (2008), Relato´ rio anual de tra´ fego Ana, Aeroportos de Portugal – Aeroporto de Faro.
Ba, S. and Pavlou, P.A. (2002), ‘‘Evidence of the effect of trust building technology in electronic markets:
price premiums and buyer behavior’’, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 26 No. 3, pp. 243-268.
Baker, C.W., Kingdon, F., Gill, R., Leveritt, J., Cvjetkovic, J. and Chambers, S. (2009), ‘‘Market
snapshot.uk second homes overseas, 2009’’, Savills International Research Rentals, available at: www.
holiday-rentals.co.uk/info/press/press-kit
Brocato, E.D. (2006), ‘‘Place attachment: an investigation of environments and outcomes in service
context’’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Texas, Arlington, TX.
Buhalis, D. and Law, R. (2008), ‘‘Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years
on and 10 years after the internet – the state of e-tourismresearch’’, TourismManagement, Vol. 29 No. 4,
pp. 609-623.
Cheng, Y. and Xie, J. (2005), ‘‘Third-party product review and ?rm marketing strategy’’, Marketing
Science, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 218-240.
Chevalier, J. and Mayzlin, D. (2006), ‘‘The effect of word-of-mouth on sales: online book reviews’’,
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 345-354.
Cresswell, T. (2006), ‘‘Place’’, Encyclopedia of Human Geography, (electronic version), available at:
www.sageereference.com/humangeography/Article_n220.html (accessed 20 February 2012).
Davenport, M.A. and Anderson, D.H. (2005), ‘‘Getting fromsense of place to place-based management:
an interpretive investigation of place meanings and perceptions of landscape change’’, Society and
Natural Resources, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 625-641.
Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds) (2003), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, Sage,
London.
Gibson, J.J. (1986/1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates,
Hillsdale, NJ, (original work published 1979).
PAGE 372
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
Gieryn, T. (2000), ‘‘A space for place in sociology’’, Annual Reviews of Sociology, Vol. 26 No. 1,
pp. 463-496.
Gretzel, U. and Fesenmaier, D.R. (2006), ‘‘Persuasion in recommendation systems’’, International
Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 81-100.
Halpenny, E.A. (2006), ‘‘Environmental behavior, place attachment and park visitation: a case study of
visitors to Point Pelee National Park’’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Waterloo, Waterloo.
HomeAway.co.uk (2009), available at: www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/info/owner-resources/owners-
product-guides/guest-reviews (accessed 1 August 2011).
Jorgensen, B.S. and Stedman, R. (2006), ‘‘A comparative analysis of predictors of sense of place
dimensions: attachment to, dependence on, and identi?cation with lakeshore properties’’, Journal of
Environmental Management, Vol. 79, pp. 316-327.
Kianicka, S., Buchecker, M., Hunziker, N. and Mu¨ ller-Bo¨ ker, U. (2006), ‘‘Locals’ and tourists’ sense of
place: a case study in a Swiss Alpine village’’, Journal of Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 26
No. 1, pp. 55-63.
Kozinets, R.V. (2010), ‘‘Netnography: the marketer’s secret weapon, netnography White Paper in
Portuguese’’, available at:http://kozinets.net/archives/416/netnography-white-paper-in-portuguese
(accessed 12 January 2011).
Kumar, N. and Benbasat, I. (2006), ‘‘The in?uence of recommendations and consumer reviews on
evaluations of websites’’, Information Systems Research, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 425-439.
Kyle, G. and Chick, G. (2007), ‘‘The social construction of a sense of place’’, Leisure Sciences, Vol. 29
No. 3, pp. 209-225.
Larsen, J., Urry, J. and Axhausen, K.W. (2007), ‘‘Networks and tourism mobile social life’’, Annals of
Tourism Research, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 244-262.
Litvin, S.W., Goldsmith, R.E. and Pan, B. (2008), ‘‘Electronic word-of-mouth in hospitality and tourism
management’’, Tourism Management, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 458-468.
Mudambi, S. and Schuff, D. (2010), ‘‘What makes a helpful online review? A study of customer reviews
on amazon.com’’, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 185-200.
Proshansky, H.M., Fabian, A.K. and Kaminoff, R. (1983), ‘‘Place identity: physical world and socialization
of the self’’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 57-83.
Relph, E. (1976), Place and Placelessness, Pion, London.
Relph, E. (2000), ‘‘Author’s response: Place and Placelessness in a new context (classics in Human
Geography revisited, Place and Placelessness)’’, Human Geography, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 613-619.
Ryan, C. and Cave, J. (2005), ‘‘Structuring destination image: a qualitative approach’’, Journal of Travel
Research, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 143-150.
Scott, M. (1999), WordSmith Tools Version 3.0, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Seamon, D. (1979), A Geography of the Life World: Movement, Rest and Encounter, Croom Helm,
London, (electronic version), available at: www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/books_intro.htm (accessed
5 February 2011).
Sen, S. and Lerman, D. (2007), ‘‘Why are you telling me this? An examination into negative consumer
reviews on the web’’, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 76-94.
Senecal, S. and Nantel, J. (2004), ‘‘The in?uence of online product recommendations on consumers’
online choices’’, Journal of Retailing, Vol. 80 No. 2, pp. 159-169.
Silverman, D. (1993), Interpreting Qualitative Data, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Sparks, B. and Browning, V. (2011), ‘‘The impact of online reviews on hotel booking intentions and
perceptions of trust’’, Tourism Management, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 1310-1323.
Stedman, R.C. (2003), ‘‘Is it really just a social construction? The contribution of the physical
environment to sense of place’’, Society and Natural Resources, Vol. 16 No. 8, pp. 671-685.
Stokols, D. and Shumaker, S.A. (1981), ‘‘People in places: a transactional view of settings’’, in Harvey, J.
(Ed.), Cognition, Social Behavior, and the Environment, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 85-125.
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
PAGE 373
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
Thurlow, C. and Jaworski, A. (2010), Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility, Palgrave
Macmillan, London.
Torkington, K. (2011), ‘‘The discursive construction of place-identity: British lifestyle migrants in the
Algarve’’, unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University, Lancaster.
Tuan, Y.F. (1980), ‘‘Rootedness versus sense of place’’, Landscape, Vol. 24, pp. 3-8.
Tuulentie, S. (2007), ‘‘Settled tourists: second homes as a part of tourist life stories’’, Scandinavian
Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 281-300.
Urry, J. (1995), Consuming Places, Sage, London.
Williams, D.R., Patterson, M.E., Roggenbuck, J.W. and Watson, A.E. (1992), ‘‘Beyond the commodity
metaphor: examining emotional and symbolic attachment to place’’, Leisure Sciences, Vol. 14 No. 1,
pp. 29-46.
Wodak, R. (2008), ‘‘Introduction: discourse studies – important concepts and terms’’, in Wodak, R. and
Krzyz?anowski, M. (Eds), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences, Palgrave Macmillan, New
York, NY, pp. 1-29.
Woodside, G.A., Cruickshank, F.B. and Dehuang, N. (2007), ‘‘Stories visitors tell about Italian cities as
destination icons’’, Tourism Management, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 162-174.
Xiang, Z. and Gretzel, U. (2010), ‘‘Role of social media in online travel information search’’, Tourism
Management, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 179-188.
Further reading
Kohli, R., Devaraj, S. and Mahmood, M.A. (2004), ‘‘Understanding determinants of online consumer
satisfaction: a decision process perspective’’, Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 2 No. 1,
pp. 115-135.
Tuan, Y.F. (1977), Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, MN.
About the authors
Joana Afonso Dias is a PhD student at Huelva University (Spain). She is interested in
e-tourism and in the impacts of information and technology on the management of tourism
and its implications for strategic management, such as virtual tourism and golf. She is
currently investigating consumer behavior theories on tourism and social interaction. Joana
Afonso Dias is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]
Filipa Perdiga˜ o Ribeiro holds a PhD in applied linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA),
from Lancaster University (UK). She has published some articles on the discursive
construction of national identity and she is currently interested in investigating tourism using
language and communication approaches. She is a Lecturer at ESGHT, University of the
Algarve where she teaches a variety of language courses.
Anto´ nia Correia is an Assistant Professor with aggregation at University of the Algarve. Her
current research interests are concerned with the application of consumer behaviour
theories to Tourism, with particular relevance to the issues associated with psycho-social
variables that in?uence the choice/decision, the external factors that affect consumer
behaviour and its social interactions, risk and uncertainty in consumer behaviour and
models of destinations choice, motivations and satisfaction, product/destination image,
virtual tourism and golf. She has published in leading journals such as Annals of Tourism
Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, among others.
PAGE 374
j
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY RESEARCH
j
VOL. 7 NO. 4 2013
To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected]
Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
This article has been cited by:
1. Joana Afonso Dias, Antónia Correia, Francisco José Martínez López. 2015. The meaning of rental second homes and places:
the owners’ perspectives. Tourism Geographies 1-18. [CrossRef]
2. Joana Afonso Dias, Antónia Correia, Francisco José Martínez López. 2014. From information-sharing to vacation rental
choices – the case of Albufeira, Portugal. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 8:1, 35-47.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
b
y
P
O
N
D
I
C
H
E
R
R
Y
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
I
T
Y
A
t
2
2
:
2
3
2
4
J
a
n
u
a
r
y
2
0
1
6
(
P
T
)
doc_650663203.pdf