The study of consumption dynamics and sociodemographics in tourism and hospitality firms: a case for auto-netnography

Purpose In recent years, the study of consumer behavior has been widely integrated into the body of tourism research. Consumer behaviors are fundamentally dynamic processes; thus, understanding both consumer dynamics and sociodemographics are crucial for understanding consumer behavior in tourism research. This paper aims to present an argument and a call-to-action for a wider acceptance and adoption of auto-netnography as an alternative method for tourism researchers and practitioners to understand better the complex consumption dynamics and sociodemographics of consumers found in tourism and hospitality firms. Design/methodology/approach Using the Scopus academic citation database, bibliometric methodologies are deployed to search for and evaluate the deployment of auto-netnographies in tourism research hitherto. Findings Despite concerns regarding addressing issues of bias, reproducibility and consistency to ensure the validity and reliability of their findings, netnographies still remain an effective and relevant research method for tourism researchers to investigate consumption dynamics and sociodemographics. However, as a progressive extension from netnography and despite the potential of auto-netnography as a research method to contribute to tourism literature by the capture of researchers’ own online experiences through their own social observations, introspection and reflexive notetaking, auto-netnographies have not been widely used in tourism research hitherto. Research limitations/implications Scopus is constantly being updated with new literature as it becomes published; therefore, our findings represent a “snapshot” of data during the period of extraction from the academic database. Different keyword search strings when undertaking the Scopus searches could have also resulted in different findings. Nevertheless, this paper expands tourism researchers’ awareness of the range of qualitative methods available by arguing that auto-netnography could complement or even replace other more traditional research methods in the future. Originality/value Netnography remains an effective research method to investigate the consumption dynamics and sociodemographics of consumers found in tourism and hospitality firms. Introspection and reflexivity are both important parts of netnography and are thus equally or more relevant in auto-netnography. A greater adoption of auto-netnography would allow the capture of researchers’ own online experiences as a consumer would and could arguably provide an alternative view of the consumption dynamics and sociodemographics of consumers that may lead to valuable theoretical and practical contributions being made to tourism literature in the future. Potential directions for the method’s ongoing development are also offered.