"Horrible cruise": a frame analysis of tourism crisis on social media

ABSTRACT

The tourism crisis communication on social media is an important task in the crisis management of tourism destinations. It affects crisis development and determines whether the crisis will evolve into a public opinion crisis or a tourism market crisis. However, there is limited systematical frame analysis in this field. Based on the Frame Theory, this paper identified the analysis structure of the tourism crisis communication on social media, as well as the dynamic response relationship between the public crisis and media crisis frames. Taking the COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess as a case, this paper collected 54 229 Weibo comments using data collectors. Besides, analysis techniques such as crisis keywords extraction, identification of hot topics of public concern, and vector autoregression(VAR)model construction were adopted. The results showed that the tourism crisis communication on social media had a life cycle. It can be divided into such four stages as hot discussion, containment, mitigation, and dissipation in light of the crisis life cycle theory, key events, and the timing characteristics of the volume of topics of public concern. In addition, this paper also identified two crisis subject frames and nine crisis information frames. Specifically, the former included the media crisis frame and the public crisis frame, and the latter contained frames of conflict, human touch, morality, economy/consequence, responsibility attribution, response, fact, analogy/understanding, and knowledge. These crisis frames are mutually restricted and interacted, and respond to each other, which provides a panorama of the communication framework and basic facts of the crisis. Moreover, topics of public concern were diversified in the public crisis, and the public and media crisis communication showed obvious differences in public opinion intensity and evolution. To be specific, the crisis frame constructed by the public during the hot discussion stage was dominated by the human touch. This was to arouse the public's emotional resonance and prompt them to make moral evaluations, analogies, and associations, as well as become empathetic. Then, the constructed frame was dominated by fact while mixed with individual emotions and moral evaluations. During the dissipation stage, it focused on the economy/consequence. The crisis frames constructed by the media focused on two core topics of fact and response and had a strong demand for responsibility attribution during the containment stage. Furthermore, the volume of public opinions had a one-way dynamic impact on the media crisis coverage, highlighting the role of social media in public crisis communication. This paper conducted a frame analysis of tourism crisis communication on social media, providing a new direction and theoretical perspective for tourism crisis communication research. Also, this paper examined the effect of public opinion on media crisis coverage from the perspective of the public opinion volume and provided empirical support for analyzing the dynamic impact of the public crisis frame on the media crisis frame in the social media context. In terms of crisis management, this paper provided strategic guidance for tourism destinations to monitor public opinion, set crisis communication agenda, and promote tourism recovery.