‘I want to record and share my wonderful journey’: Chinese Millennials’ production and sharing of short-form travel videos on TikTok or Douyin

TLDR

The study investigates how social media involvement shapes tourists’ travel experiences by examining their motivations for engaging with TikTok travel videos. The authors conducted phenomenological semi‑structured interviews with 12 TikTok‑using tourists to explore their consumption, production, and sharing of travel videos. Tourists engage with TikTok travel videos to create touristic fantasies, hashtag their journeys, and archive life publicly; daily use blurs tourism and everyday life, supporting a Leisure‑Tourism Continuum, and the study recommends that destination marketing organizations tailor TikTok content to tourist needs.

Abstract

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.