The role of stories in travel posts to social media

The story turn in tourism: forces and futures

“…In turn, this reflects the centrality of stories to psychology (Popova, 2015), sociology (Polletta et al , 2011) and anthropology (Dunn, 2017). As Gottschall (2012) notes, neuroscientists have demonstrated that stories are literally hardwired into human brains and so influence the way we organize, make sense, store and remember information, how we determine, maintain and express individual and social identity and how we learn and communicate (Pearce and Moscardo, 2019). In addition to the tourism research into UGC, there is an increasing interest in stories as a guide to experience design (Moscardo, 2010, 2017, 2018; Woodside, 2010).…”

“…For experience opportunity design, it is likely that there will be both a move to increasing tourist engagement and interaction with destination stories and a move to focusing experience opportunities not just on destination stories but on tourists creating their own stories. For destination promotion, it is likely that this will not only involve what has been called transmedia storytelling using a variety of communication channels (Pearce and Moscardo, 2019) but also support the development of destination story worlds connected with themes that highlight the destination’s distinctiveness, that are appealing to tourism and that are acceptable to destination communities.…”