تدوین الگوی تجربه به یادماندنی دیجیتال گردشگری در مقاصد منتخب گردشگری ایران با رویکرد داده بنیاد

Objectives: Given that tourism is inherently experiential, tourists gain memorable experiences when they purchase from a tourism company’s offerings and interact with other tourists and locals at the destination. A memorable tourism experience leads tourists to make decisions about their travel plans to revisit the same place in the future. Tourism marketing has undergone many changes with the emergence of digital platforms and the increasing role of user-generated content. A digital tourism experience is the digital support provided to tourists before, during, and after visiting a destination. These all-encompassing digital technologies have different characteristics, but can be integrated at the tourism touchpoint to enhance the tourism experience and create memorable digital tourism experiences. Studies in the tourism experience have shown a wide use of the concept of memorable tourism experience, including immersion in digital technologies, but none of them explain the integration between tourism travel, digitalization, and memorable experience in a single concept. In addition, Iran has diverse and attractive tourist destinations, including historical cities such as Isfahan and Shiraz, natural areas such as the forests of Mazandaran, and central deserts such as the Yazd Desert. The existence of political, economic, social, and other problems has caused tourists to not have a pleasant experience of tourist destinations. In addition, due to negative media advertising, many people in the world do not have a correct idea of the beautiful and historical country of Iran. Therefore, the present study examines the concept of a memorable digital tourism experience, its effective factors, and its consequences in selected Iranian tourist destinations.

Methods: This research uses grounded theory and has a qualitative approach. The present study used the opinions of 18 tourism industry experts. The interview questions are open-ended questions and the respondent can express the contents freely. The interviews were conducted in a friendly atmosphere and each lasted about 30 minutes. In order to evaluate the validity of the interview questions, the content validity index was used. If the value of the content validity index is more than 0.79, the validity of the interview questions is confirmed, and according to the results obtained, the content validity of the questions was confirmed. Also, in order to evaluate the reliability of the data collection tool, the secondary coding method was used. In the secondary coding method, the interviews were coded and reviewed separately by another coder in addition to the researcher, and the percentage of intra-subject agreement was calculated to be 0.91.

Result: Using open coding, 323 initial concepts were extracted. After the initial codes were extracted, a phase of multiple returns to the data and continuous comparison of the codes with each other began. In this phase, codes that were semantically similar or very close were merged based on semantic similarity and conceptual overlap, and codes that were not related to the research topic or were only raised in one interview and did not contain a very novel or important point were eliminated. From these concepts, 49 categorical propositions and 10 main categories were obtained through selective coding. This research led to the development of a framework for a memorable digital tourism experience through a qualitative approach.

Conclusion: Combining the data-driven theory with the stimulus-organism-response framework showed that the seven dimensions of a memorable digital tourism experience include enjoyment of digital tourism, novelty, knowledge and learning, meaningfulness, relevance, online sharing and socialization, and digital control and empowerment. The presented model shows that tourism organizations can provide a suitable foundation for the formation of these dimensions by managing the stimuli (tourist personal factors, the physical and cultural environment of the destination, sustainable and responsible tourism, and the electronic service scape), which ultimately leads to consequences for the tourist and the destination. This model can be a basis for designing digital marketing strategies and planning the development of smart tourism in Iran.