Travel Interaction

Within the topic of travel, which is this blog’s focus, there are plenty of opportunities for interaction! Travel invites interaction because it allows people to connect with new people, environments, and experiences. Planning a trip requires interaction with online booking sites, other people via phone calls and other communication, and various other types of research. Typically the interactions that are achieved through traveling are gotten by internet use via computer or smart phone (etc), in person interactions, and phone calls.

There are plenty of different digital media that people in the world of travel use. People can interact using any social media such as Instagram or Snapchat. Medium such as those allow people to post pictures of their travelling experiences with different captions. Snapchat specifically also allows for interaction through Snapchat Maps where people can be shown at different locations and they can generate a compilation of Snap Stories together based on where they are. This can create a type of story that is based on people interacting on a social media platform where they may or may not even realize that they are contributing to an even bigger location based compiled story if they allow their story to be posted publicly.

There are also plenty of travel specific web pages that definitely invite user interaction! A specific example of a travel site that is often a source of interaction would be TripAdvisor which can be found at https://www.tripadvisor.com/?fid=bfca497f-6d63-4e0d-9de3-e261c44c5740. TripAdvisor is a travel website company that shows hotel and restaurant reviews, accommodation bookings, and other travel related content. TripAdvisor includes interactive travel forums and it is filled with plenty of user generated content which also contributes to its interactivity.

Interaction can be gained from users in different forms, some types generating more user interaction than others. There are layers of interactivity that gauge the amount of impact the users have on the outcome of the story as well. In the case of using TripAdvisor since it is so based on user generated content and interactivity, it would be said to have a higher amount of interactivity. It could be considered a type of emergent interactivity within the layers of interactivity because part of the “story” on TripAdvisor is created by users (such as hotel reviews for example) but then there are also other parts created by the system (such as hotel booking pages).

Interactivity, in its many forms, is everywhere… whether you realize it or not! But now you know that even travelers are engaging in forms of interactivity everyday! Whether they are researching trips, booking them, posting about them, joining in on interactive travel pages (such as review pages, etc), or even using social media…and many more things!