Exploring Travel Social Media: A Case of Cannabis Museum Servicescape

Abstract

© 2020 IEEE. Cannabis tourism has been brought to attention since many countries have legalized cannabis usage, especially for medical purposes. Several cities in European countries allow cannabis grows and recreational usages for decades. Still, only handful papers explored the motivation of cannabis tourists. This study aims to investigate the visitation perceptions among tourists who have visited one of the two selected famous cannabis museums, including Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum in Barcelona, Spain. According to customer knowledge management (CKM), knowledge from customers obtained from social media is considered the powerful information essential for an organization's innovation. Hence, this study collected and examined data from social media. The methodology of the current study mainly used the sequential mixed method with text mining and netnography. Data were retrieved from online reviews posted on Tripadvisor.com in order to analyze the visitors' perceptions of the museum servicescape, while traditional museum attributes and museum purposes were employed as the fundamental concepts of the study. First, data were collected by Web Scraper,the web crawling tool used for pooling reviews from the social media, following by text analytics.The results reveal that cannabis museum visitors have slightly different motivations from the regular museum visitors. The theoretical implication contributes to this particular type of museum attributes, which then became an important knowledge for designing a cannabis museum in the future. The limitations of the current study are the small number of sample museums and the lack of information from the supplier side.