DOI

10.18151/7217540

Abstract

Despite researchers have made a great deal of effort on exploring the reasons of travel consumers’ participation in UGC sites and the roles of these sites in different phases of their travel, knowledge on what factors influence travel consumers’ behavioral intentions in social media still remains largely unknown to both scholars and practitioners. With the attempts to find out this, we conducted a two-phase study on Chinese consumers. Utilizing the two sets of data we collected (npost = 65; nratings = 1668), we develop a multiple linear regression model to assess the influential factors in UGC sites on consumers’ behavioral intentions. Our results indicate that travel consumers’ purchase intention, word-of-mouth (WOM) intention, and attitudes towards destination brands are positively affected by the UGC features (creditability and interestingness) and consumers’ social media engagement (comment, retweet, and like).Further, inconsistent with the previous finding that credibility is a major concern in consumers’ information search processes, the interestingness of UGC is found to be more important.

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