The End of Mass Tourism: How Travel Bloggers are Changing Perception of Touristic Objects

This final qualifying work is dedicated to the research of current situation in a tourism sector that experiences a gradual decline in the amount of mass travels; growth of post-tourism tendencies; and investigation of the impact of new media on travelling. The most important goal of my work is to discover correlations between both fields of media and tourism in the current age and analyse the amount of influence on a modern travelling scene social media personas have, in order to predict future customers’ tendencies. This research will demand not only theoretical basis but also completing such steps as online data scraping, composing performance indicator and analysis of the results. As a background for these studies, I have chosen an extensive amount of literature on these subjects, including readings that demonstrate the correlation of these fields and their influence on each other; as well as other sociological, psychological and socio-analytical works on the matter. They will demonstrate how drastically our everyday world is changing, depict prerequisites for the state of travelling industry in different countries and show how our cultural and historical background will influence our future life (particularly, our ways of travelling and reception of information). Contemporary society now has plenty of tools, earlier unavailable to broad mass of mankind. They ease travelling process by offering more affordable prices on housing, transportation and food. What is more, they don’t require any special guides, language proficiency and, most importantly, - a lot of money. It is interesting to follow the path into the future and see how society accepts these new rules and to which extent it agrees to play by them. Speaking of academic significance of my work, I hope that it will prove to be valuable in the marketing development of tourism sector, forcing mass travelling to be more considerate of new tendencies. What is more, I wish to highlight the work, done by international social media marketing, admit their role in forming the scene of tourism, and encourage listening to their advices and learning new techniques from them. Tourism is an extremely important sector of governmental politics and economics; therefore, problems on the matter should be treated with respect and attention. And finally, I want to prove uniqueness of Russian own way of dealing with tourism and analyse its good and bad peculiarities. Many extensive problems that we currently face, come from wrong marketing, inept usage of modern technologies and quite outdated ideas on what is presumably attractive for a tourist. My objectives for the project will be completed if I can support my hypothesis (which identifies a dominant influence on travelling from bloggers) with arguments, based on theoretical literature review and KPI results.