Museum experience in battlefield tourism: a netnographic approach

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to analyze the war museum experience by analyzing the comments and feedback provided by visitors on Google and TripAdvisor. This analysis intends to uncover the various aspects of war museum experiences. Design/methodology/approach A total of 201 comments, in which visitors explicitly articulated their experiences at the museum, were subjected to analysis. The comments were examined using a netnography analysis. Four dimensions; object experience, cognitive experience, introspective experience and social experience were used to group the analyzed remarks. Findings The findings indicate that the majority of the participants' museum experiences at the Canakkale Gallipoli Epic Promotion Center were introspective experiences, that the visitors felt extremely strong emotions as a result of the technological systems used in the museum and that they perceived the museum as being in a combat zone. Additionally, it was noted that the appearance of the artifacts in the museums really impressed the tourists and that the museum had provided them with thorough information about the war. Research limitations/implications The limitations of this study are the number of visitors to the museum and the number of reviews written on Google and TripAdvisor about the visit experience. Especially since the majority of the reviews on Google do not include comments and only consist of ratings, the number of comments on the museum experience is limited. Originality/value While there exists a range of studies examining the experiences of tourists at historical places, there is a scarcity of research that specifically focuses on analyzing the impacts of these experiences from the visitors' standpoint. Given the absence of any existing study examining the experiences of war museum visitors using the netnographic approach within this particular context, this research is believed to possess originality and is anticipated to address the existing gap in the relevant literature. Furthermore, this work holds significant theoretical and practical ramifications for curators and scholars. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, since this research is the first to comprehensively analyze the experiences of war museum visitors using the netnographic approach and no similar studies have been found in existing literature, the findings of this study are considered original.