Social Virtual Worlds’ Success Factors: Four Studies’ Insights for the Tourism Supply and Demand Side Brigitte Stangl Institute for Tourism und Leisure Research, HTW Chur brigitte.stangl@htwchur.ch Margit Kastner Institute for Tourism and Leisure Studies, WU Vienna margit.kastner@wu.ac.at Felicitas Polsterer Institute for Tourism and Leisure Studies, WU Vienna feli.polsterer@gmx.at Abstract This study summarizes success factors of virtual worlds (VWs) examined in scientific studies. One success factor attracting users is that VWs comprise a critical mass of residents. The most popular social VW Second Life (SL) struggles to reach this criterion. Nevertheless, businesses put time and money into virtual representations. This research aims at revealing reasons for this effort by conducting four empirical studies in the field of tourism. The first two studies examine the supply side, evaluating representations and looking at drivers for doing business in SL; the other two studies focus on the demand side. The aim is to detect reasons for using SL as an information source and to reveal underlying values SL provides to its residents. Results show that the supply side uses SL to arouse emotions, to target new customers, and for relationship management. Travelers are attracted by added values the social VW provides. 1. Introduction The idea of VWs has fascinated people for a long time and the amount of people participating in VWs has been increasing. Since 2007, 72 VWs have been launched and 47 have reached more than one million registrations each [32]. Altogether, registered accounts with VWs total nearly 1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2011 [31]. Motivations to become registered users vary widely, however, among the most common are socializing, escapism, and entertainment [e.g. 41, 49, 52, 54, 56]. Research dealing with the advantages of, and barriers to, participating in VWs is still in its infancy. This is especially true for empirical surveys focusing on the services dominated tourism industry in VWs. Thus, the present paper makes manifold contributions by: i) presenting a summary of success factors of VWs and highlighting the differences and similarities between game-oriented and social-oriented VWs (GVWs and SVWs respectively); ii) understanding why tourism enterprises represent themselves in SL; iii) uncovering which kind of travel information people search for in VWs; and iv) determining what intrinsic values VWs provide to their residents. 2. Theoretical Background The term “virtual world” has been discussed and used in many ways by academics, industry professionals, and the media, however a commonly accepted definition is still indeterminate. Several authors have offered their own views about the concept of VWs, but they do not agree with one another in all aspects [4]. A comprehensive description of the essence of VWs is given by KZero [30; p.2] who defines them as “[…] digital 3D environments accessed in real-time that allow people to explore, examine, and interact with the objects created within the world and importantly […] allow people to interact together in a shared collaborative space regardless of their geographical location”. Another definition proposed by Bell [4; p.2] combines explanations by Bartle [2], Koster [26], and Castranova [7] stating VWs are “a synchronous persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers”. The definitions point to VWs’ characteristics of shared space, graphical user inter- faces (GUIs) in which users move with their avatars [22], immediacy, socialization, and persistence [5]. 2.1. Classification of VWs and success factors Within recent years several classifications or typologies of VWs have appeared. Messinger et al. [42] introduced a categorization adapted from Porter’s typology of virtual communities [44]. Schultze and Rennecker [46] developed a classification scheme, differentiating game rules on a continuum between realism and fantasy. Moreover, they distinguish between progression and emergence, which is the most 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 978-0-7695-4525-7/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2012.539 993