Travel livestream influencers: a netnographic analysis of livestreamers' narrative and interactional flows to construct a destination image

Influencer marketing is a well-established destination marketing strategy, traditionally relying on the authority of travel social media influencers (TSMIs) to create inspiring destination images (Glover, 2019; Gretzel, 2017). TSMIs typically use visual social media platforms to showcase destinations (Femenia-Serra et al., 2022). However, the recent rise of audio-visual platforms like Twitch, which boomed during Covid-19, has introduced a new category of influential figures: “livestreamers” (Liu et al., 2021). Livestreamers are authorative individuals, who offer product display and purchase services through trials and experience sharing in an online live streaming room (Hu & Chaudry, 2017). From the Covid-19 pandemic, they have expanded to “travel livestreaming” (Liu et al., 2022) especially on Twitch (Deng et al., 2021), taking viewers on daily walks around cities, showcasing monuments, attractions, and local life and interacting with their audience. Through these outdoor broadcasts, livestreamers showcase a vivid image of these destinations (Zhang et al., 2021), and also offer a moment of socialization to viewers. Therefore, I see in livestreamers a new category of TSMI, producing similarly inspirational but more interacting contents on destinations. Hence, analyzing their broadcasting trajectory can provide valuable insights into how they construct destination images, which can be useful for destination marketers (Zheng et al., 2022). I ground this study in the burgeoning literature on travel live streaming (Liu et al., 2022; Zheng et al., 2022; Deng et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022) and TSMI (Gretzel, 2017; Xu & Pratt, 2018; Femenia-Serra et al., 2022; Jang et al., 2021). These studies highlighted the potential of this format to create a destination image encouraging future travels, and also drew similarities between livestreamers and TSMIs. However, due to the emergent nature of the phenomenon, at present empirical studies are missing that analyze the cultural production of self-presentation, commodification and socialization dynamics that livestreamers use to construct this image. To reach this gap, I conducted a netnographic research (Kozinets, 2020) on cultural tourism, with the aims of uncovering the narrative and interactional flows, as well as the interplays between them, performed in these outdoor broadcasts and how they create meanings and elicit desire for viewers around a destination image. I specifically analyzed 59 livestreaming on Twitch, broadcasting heritage city tours (273h of observation), and the viewers conversations on these videos (276.909 comments). The preliminary findings reveal the travel live streaming as a techno-cultural phenomenon, with specific canonized narrative and interactional flows that occur according to four particular trajectories of the experience flow (see Figure 1). These flows not only create an inspiring destination image for viewers (Zheng et al., 2022), but also trigger self-narrative behaviors about past tourism experiences, as well as a feeling of nostalgia among them. Moreover, these flows, when fueled with intensification (Just, 2019) from livestreamers, who incorporate moments of intimate self-disclosure in the flow, trigger in viewers a sense of physical proximity to the livestreamers and the feeling of having vicariously experienced the travel journey alongside them. This study contributes to the literature on travel live streaming and TSMI, by clarifying the nuanced dynamics of destination image construction in an outdoor broadcast. It also reveals the potential of livestreamers as a new category of TSMI, able to cultivate an emotional bond with their viewers, making livestreaming not only a tool for travel inspiration but also a conduit for travel immersion.