Popular Culture Review 30.2
connection between attitudes toward destination and travel intention ( see Jalilvand et al . 485 ) and to consider how tourism organizations might take advantage of user-generated content ( see Akehurst 51 ).
Though insightful , scholars are careful to recognize visitors often only post about unusually good or unusually bad experiences . Many tourists never post about travel experiences at all , and of those who do , few offer more than a handful of details about their engagement with the subject . Further , there is often no way to verify a reviewer actually experienced the place or service posted about , no way to ensure the accuracy of the review , and no means of determining when a reviewer ’ s experience actually took place . Nonetheless , eWOM reviews offer researchers insight into the minds of tourists and a means of gathering a large amount of presumably unbiased data that can be used to examine a number of phenomena . And , like literature , content encountered on-line contributes to perceptions of related places and impressions of the types of activities and behaviors that can and should be enacted there ( Cantallops and Salvi 43 ; Livtin et al . 466 ).
Data Analysis
The 257 reviews were first examined using an open-coding approach where the data were explored with no initial expectations about what might be found . During the initial coding phase , reviews were examined for any mention of features that contributed to a visit in one way or another ( good , bad , or indifferent ). Creswell explains open coding consists of “ coding the data for its major categories of information ... from this coding , axial coding emerges in which the researcher identifies one open coding category to focus on ... then goes back to the data and creates categories around this phenomenon ” ( 64 ). With this approach in mind , the data
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