Virtual Tourism, Real Experience: A Motive-Oriented Approach to Virtual Tourism

Virtual tourism products promise to combine the best of two worlds: Staying in the safety of one’s home while having engaging tourism experiences. Previous tourism research has emphasised that tourism experiences involve more than just seeing other places. They address cultural motives such as novelty and education and socio-psychological motives like relaxation, escape from a mundane environment or facilitation of social interaction. We suggest applying the motive-oriented perspective in HCI research on virtual tourism and report on a corresponding analysis of 21 virtual tourism products. Our findings show that current virtual tourism products neglect the breadth of tourist motives. They mainly focus on cultural motives while rarely addressing socio-psychological motives, especially kinship relationships and prestige. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of the motive-oriented perspective for HCI and inspired conceptual ideas for addressing motives in virtual tourism products that may be useful for future research and design in this area.

Conference paper