Legitimacy in co-creating tourism value through customer-to-customer (C2C) online travel communities

Legitimacy is a fundamental dimension of co-creation as it determines the desirability, suitability, and appropriateness of individuals or organisations in any community. This research explores how users establish legitimacy when co-creating value in online travel communities. The proliferation of online communities propels a bottom-up approach to legitimacy that resides at the micro level within online contexts and can be achieved through discursive legitimacy. The research context focuses on travellers during the COVID period and the online customer-to-customer (C2C) community they formulated. Travellers’ posts were analysed based on thematic analysis. Findings reveal the five discursive legitimation strategies used to legitimate or delegitimate proposed co-creation practices in tourism, namely: authorisation, rationalisation, trustification, normalisation and narrativisation. These were employed by multiple online users to influence travellers and were associated with discursive resources (technology affordances) to support narratives during times of contestations. The discursive strategies aided in creating two levels of customer-to-customer value co-created experiences. This research moves away from the dominant institutional approach to provide a novel understanding of legitimacy in tourism: discursive legitimacy, which is more relevant for online customer-to-customer (C2C) travel communities' co-creation practices.