Paper short abstract:

Based on a mixed-method approach combining long-term fieldwork in tourist places and data scraping from the application programming interfaces of Twitter and Instagram, this paper examines the media practices of travel vloggers and tourism professionals during influencer campaigns in Estonia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the media practices of travel vloggers and tourism professionals during influencer campaigns in Estonia. Committed to a mixed-method approach (Born and Haworth, 2017), the aim of this investigation is to gain a better understanding of the valorisation of cultural media content about travel destinations in the increasingly globalised tourism industry. Based on long-term fieldwork in tourist places and data scraping from the application programming interfaces of Twitter and Instagram, the story of travel vloggers in Estonia indicates how digital media are reshuffling power relations within the global assemblages of tourism. On the one hand, tourism organisations aim to influence the circulation of posts on digital media platforms. On the other hand, travel vloggers seek to produce authentic stories about travel destinations.

The Estonian tourism board organised `influencer campaigns` in 2018 and 2019, inviting travellers with influential digital media profiles to Tallinn. All the travel influencers were offered free transportation to and accommodation in the Estonian capital. The campaign organisers demanded in turn that the travel influencers took part in daily shootings and posted messages on their accounts during the stay. The influencers, who came from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia and Turkey, visited major tourist attractions in Tallinn. Re-appropriating digital media platforms, travel vloggers engage in self-portraiture within a newly evolving attention economy (Marwick, 2015). In this paper, I will assess the different forms of value exchange during influencer events and the current transformations of the tourism ecology in Tallinn.