Many of these
social mediaWebsites assist consumers in posting and sharing their
travel-related comments, opinions, and personal experiences,
which then serve as information for others. This supports the
argument by Thomas Friedman (2006) that ‘‘the world is flat’’, with
consumers gaining substantially more power in determining the
production and distribution of information due to the flattening of
access on the Internet. At the same time, the Internet also
increasingly mediates tourism experiences as tourists use these
social media sites to portray, reconstruct and relive their trips
(Pudliner, 2007; Tussyadiah & Fesenmaier, 2009).