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Seeking to understand how involvement with social media influences travel experiences, the current investigation explores the reasoning and social justifications of tourists’ engagement with travel videos on the short-form video sharing platform – TikTok. Using phenomenology, data consisted of semi-structured interviews with 12 tourists who had experiences consuming, producing, and sharing travel videos on TikTok. Findings suggest that consuming and creating TikTok touristic fantasies, hashtagging a #wonderfuljourney through sharing, and storing my meaningful life in a ‘public’ diary are three primary reasons for tourists’ engagement in TikTok travel videos. Results show that the daily use of TikTok, a visual storytelling platform, has extended to the tourism context, resulting in the eroding boundaries between tourism experiences and everyday life and contributing to an understanding of the ‘Leisure-Tourism’ Continuum in Web 2.0. It advocates DMOs to produce tourism videos based on tourist needs and the distinctness of the platform of TikTok.
Du et al. (Wed,) studied this question.