Benefits of Online Sources of Information in the Tourism Sector: The Key Role of Motivation to Co-Create

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between social media and the destination image as well as to analyze the mediating role of motivation to co-create in that relationship. The paper deals with an interesting topic and contributes to the existing literature and knowledge on social media and tourism. The paper is well written and easy to follow. However, the paper needs some further improvement. The authors are invited to revise the manuscript to address the following points:

• On page 2, line 55, the authors argue that the study of social media in the tourism sector is still at an early stage. I disagree. In recent years, a large volume of articles has been published that cover this topic to a great extent.
• Authors should enrich the literature review (conceptual framework) with a section with basic theory on destination branding. The meaning of the destination image should be clarified, the differences between the destination image and the destination identity should be explained, and the importance of the destination image for the success of the destination should be highlighted. For example, it seems that at some points in the text the authors confuse the concept of identity with the concept of image. Destination identity refers to the unique distinctive characteristics and meanings that exist in a place and its culture at a given point in time. The characteristics are constructed through historical, economic, political, religious, social and cultural discourses. The elements of destination identity are composed from the supply side (DMOs or other tourism authorities) and the elements of destination image are composed from the consumer side (visitors/tourists). The image is the way in which the public interprets the identity of a place, the elements of which are transmitted through advertising, social media, etc. The alignment between these two (identity and image) is the key for a successful destination branding strategy.
• In the methodology section, the authors must indicate when the research took place (time period).
• On page 2, line 75, the authors state that one of their research objectives is “…to better understand which social media source has the strongest impact on the destination image. Later, on section 6 (future research), they state that “…future research should seek to identify social media platforms beyond those included here, which would help determine which ones have the most impact on the destination image”. If this research objective is not achieved, it is preferable to remove it.
• A very important limitation of the research (which however is mentioned by the authors in the limitations section) is that 48% of the sample consists of Cuenca residents. In my opinion, the locals should be excluded from the research. Usually the locals are proud of their place, they see it positively, and they certainly do not wait for the posts on social media to form their image of the place where they live and work.

Author Response

We greatly appreciate the opportunity to revise the manuscript. We are so grateful for your encouragement and constructive comments. We feel they allowed to improve the paper very much and hope you agree.

Please note that from this point on, when necessary, we will include extracts of the text of the new version for you to see our additions and changes regarding the different points you raised.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of the paper is innovative and the processing of the paper is in accordance with current state of knowledge in scientific community. The literature sources are contemporary, so the literature review forms an adequate basis for the upcoming research. The purpose of the study in the sense of the review is clear in relation to the intended research gap. However, there is no discussion part in the study. It is necessary to supplement this section to a sufficient extent, and thus fulfil the character of the traditional IMRD (introduction, methodology, results, discussion) structure of scientific papers. The purpose of the discussion is to contrast the significance of study findings compared to the secondary data about the research problem. It facilitates to support the overall importance of results. Discussion in its traditional structure should be enriched by constructive comparison of results between the various sample segments (according age, gender, level of education etc.), as the authors devoted a striking space to the composition of the sample in their study, but subsequently they did not work at all with these facts.

Overall, I was interested to read this manuscript and I believe that it is worthy of a publication in this journal after minor corrections.

I wish the authors the best of luck with their future research.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for the positive evaluation of the manuscript. All the points raised were addressed as detailed below. We appreciate these suggestions, which have allowed us to improve the paper.

Please note that from this point on, when necessary, we will include extracts of the text of the new version of the manuscript for you to see our additions and changes regarding the different points you raised.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors clear understand destination image and are well versed in the literature. However I have several challenges with the paper which I hope are to do with phraseology rather than a deeper challenge.  Firstly conceptually I am struggling with the objectives. After reading them I do not understand what you are trying to do, in particular the link between sourcing information and motivation for co-creation - which is not sourcing information. Your explanation is very convoluted and needs simplification.it’s not clear what you are trung to investigate.   Secondly there is the question of what you call ’social media’.  Is this supposed to be respondents’ use of social media?  Because again it is not clear.  And if it is use of the three categories of social media, are they supposed to be mutually exclusive?  Surely a user of search engines could also be a user of blogs?  And how did you account for this in the study?  Yous ay that you are NOT studying social media as a single construct, yet you do not seem to delineate it in your measurement of variables?  On a related note, I would argue that search is not social media - it is published by a third party company and it’s connection to social is very tenuous.  You could also argue that blogs below in the autonomous category as they 'foster general knowledge about the destination’.  So overall definitions are also not very clear and need much work to be clear and set the scene for the study.   A further problem is that the sample is not representation and in fact highly biased as respondents are digital users and in some (many) cases social media users.  Thus more likely to be motivated, tainting the results.  In addition it appears that many respondents were residents of the area, which is a bit strange given that destination image usually refers to visitor’s perception of a destination.   Overall these three challenges (unclear objectives, unclear definitions and sampling issues) make it very difficult to understand the paper.  It’s clear that much work has been done, but right now it is not possible to judge whether the work is of sufficient quality to merit publication.  I would encourage the authors to redraft the paper, focusing on understandability and clarity.  

 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the positive words towards the paper. Also, we thank the reviewer for the constructive comments. We feel they allowed to improve the paper very much and hope you agree.

Please note that from this point on, when necessary, we will include extracts of the text of the new version for you to see our additions and changes regarding the different points you raised.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Review comments have been fully accepted and included to the paper. Thus, the paper in its current form is suitable to be published. I wish good luck to the authors in their further research and I look forward to meet outcomes of their research in scientific community.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments. We really appreciate your feedback and acknowledgement. Thank you again for the recognition.

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for your revisions which have gone someway towards improving the paper.   Unfortunately, the majority of my original questions remain.

 

• I am unsure what you are trying to do. You talk about ‘social media’ (presumably this should be ‘consumer user of social media” rather than the media themselves?  In Table 2 you now specify what media were tested.  Search engines, by no stretch of the imagination, could be regarded as social media.  Official websites are, by definition, published by an organisation, and thus are not social media.  For reservations websites, how did you distinguish between the published information and the user ratings, which would affect consumers perceptions of information quality? Ditto Maps are not social media. And certain of the others are debatable. Thus, there is a gap between what you say you are doing and the data used for analysis, calling into question your results.
  
  
• You have not addressed my question of how you dealt with the problem of mutual exclusivity? Given that consumers typically visit multiple websites when planning a trip, how did you separate the effect of having seen more than one in terms of their individual effect on destination image?
  
  
• Thirdly you do not deal with the issue of sample bias and in fact introduce another problem. Firstly, by only surveying social media users, you are in fact only testing the destination image of social media users, not tourists in general.  Secondly, if I understand your response correctly, some of these are not tourists but visitors, which again means you are making claims in the results that are not supported by the data.
  
  
• Lastly, I would point out that significant English language problems remain. An example, but by no means the only example, is the paragraph inserted in response to my first substantive comment (beginning “[...] First, although people”).  Here the English language use is overly complex and to be honest, not at all clear.  Having read it several times I am no clearer as to what the author(s) are trying to say.  This does a disservice to the quality of the work, as it makes it difficult for the reviewer(s)/readers to understand the paper.

 

Overall, despite some improvements, I feel that you have largely failed to address my concerns and this I cannot recommend publication. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. Following your recommendations, you can find the improvement and changes included in the new version of our manuscript.  

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the revised paper.  Unfortunately, despite cosmetic changes, my original comments remain unanswered.  In fact you have muddied the waters further by the introduction of the term 'commercial sources' in your definitions, while continuing to include them within social media in the rest of the paper.  

My feeling here is that if you want to pursue publication, you need to go back to square one in terms of writing the paper.  Stop trying to make incremental changes, which are only progressively making the issues more confusing, and rewrite from scratch/