The influence of social media in creating expectations. An empirical study for a tourist destination
Introduction
Social media have an impact on tourism, especially in the way the way travellers access and use tourism information (Xiang, Magnini, & Fesenmaier, 2015). These media have affected the tourism environment by changing the behaviour of both tourists and business sectors (Jacobsen & Munar, 2012). While social media and the Internet was becoming popular among tourists (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010), the tourism industry turned into an information-intense industry, since the social media allow tourists to challenge and collaborate in producing, consuming and distributing travel information through the Internet (Yoo & Gretzel, 2009). In addition, Xiang et al. (2015) added that the arrival of online and cloud access through mobile devices can create new sources of information to be searched, which later tend to become progressively more prominent in guiding travel decisions.
Due to the fact that the social media have various utilities, they have gained a substantial amount of popularity in travellers’ use of the Internet (Nezakati et al., 2015, Zeng and Gerritsen, 2014). The reasons for this popularity are that social media allow large numbers of people to express opinions, feeling, experiences, etc. in an innovative way (Luo & Zhong, 2015). Similarly, in our case, these people are tourists who can search for, read and receive information regarding tourist suppliers and tourist destinations through the reviews that were posted by other tourists via social media (Chung and Koo, 2015, Sigala et al., 2012). Hence, the reviews posted on social media, which recent literature has named user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM), are important for both generating and acquiring information related to travel.
The study of UGC related to tourism on social media is still in an early stage (Zeng & Gerritsen, 2014), although we can separate it into two phases. The first includes most of the literature concentrated on general information and how it affects the tourism industry. It was found that earlier research works, such as that of Conrady (2007), in their respective studies, analysed the influence of the new technologies on tourism. Further, other researchers, such as Cox et al., 2009, Gretzel and Yoo, 2008 analysed the impact of the UGC on travel planning decisions, especially those concerning accommodation. The second refers to the literature that attempts to link UGC on social media to other aspects such as tourists' behaviour (Gretzel, Lee, Tussyadiah, & Fesenmaier, 2009), intention to buy/use (Cox et al., 2009), attitudinal factors and their influence on the use and creation of UGC (Daugherty, Eastin, & Bright, 2008), trust in and the creditability of the websites on which the UGC is posted and their impact on trip planning (Yoo et al., 2007, Yoo et al., 2009), and loyalty and the effect of electronic work-of-mouth (eWOM) on the final destination choices (Luo & Zhong, 2015).
Authors such as Lim, Chung, and Weaver (2012) or more recently Zeng and Gerritsen (2014) express their interest in discovering how UGC on social media inform the different players in the tourism industry, so as to enrich tourist experiences and to promote tourist services and destinations. Nevertheless, the research on UGC in the tourism sector still needs to expand and fill the research gap in several different areas. For example, various studies focus on the motive for creating such contents (Munar and Jacobsen, 2014, Daugherty et al., 2008) or the motivations for visiting a destination (Llodrá-Riera, Martínez-Ruiz, Jiménez-Zarco, & Izquierdo-Yusta, 2015), but none of them concentrate on the motivations for receiving the contents and how this can encourage tourists to visit the destination. Moreover, to date there are no studies dealing with the relationships between UGC in social media and tourists’ expectations.
In order to further the knowledge of UGC related to the tourism industry and to close the gap, our study aims to analyse the impact of received UGC on tourists' expectations, and, more particularly, to determine how their expectations about a tourist destination are generated via the use of social media. Specifically, it will examine how the intensity of social media usage can influence the motivations for receiving UGC and how it can persuade tourists to visit the destination, with special attention given to the effect on tourists’ expectations. Thus, we have designed a research study concentrated on a specific tourist destination: Valencia, Spain. This research has two different parts. First, we focused on tourists to see how and why the tourists use UGC. Second, from the first part, we discover how UGC influences tourists’ behaviour, particularly their expectations and trust. Finally, we discuss the contributions made by the study, recommendations, and future research for the academic field of tourism.
Section snippets
Conceptual framework and theorical model
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the expectancy disconfirmation paradigm was applied for the evaluation of satisfaction on product performance (Oliver, 1977). Later, in the 1980s, more researchers expanded it to include knowledge about service satisfaction. The problematic issues started when Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry presented a SERVQUAL in 1988 to measure perception on service quality. It was criticized and became one of the most prolific debates in the 1990s. For example, Cronin
An influence of the intensity of social media usage on the received UGC in tourism
Social media have become a habit for daily communication (Luo & Zhong, 2015). Four out of five Internet users have a social media account, Facebook being the most frequently used in the world (GlobalWebIndex, 2014). The statistical figures act as evidence of the intense behaviour in using social media. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), increasing intensity and experience in virtual social network usage demonstrates behaviour that is becoming more similar to real life. For example, people
Data collection and sampling design
A questionnaire with a series of questions related to tourists' use of the social media and their trip was created. We first screened the samples by selecting only tourists who had used social media to search for travel information and were travelling to the main tourist attractions in Valencia, Spain. Spain has been one of the top three countries in terms of the number of tourists in the world for over ten years and the Valencia Community has always been in the top five positions within Spain (
Results of the MIMIC model
After examining the relationships between the causes and the latent variable, the results agree with the previous literature mentioned above in that there is a positive relationship between the reason for socializing and behaviour. The results indicated that socializing and creating relationships contribute to the intensity of social media usage (β = 0.22, t = 3.03) and, besides, updating and searching for information are also the cause underlying the level of the intensity of social media usage (β =
Intensity of social media usage
Responding to our initial research issue, the origin of and reasons for social media usage are reviewed in this section as a part of the MIMIC analysis. As explained in the literature, one of the main reasons for using UGC is for socializing and creating relationships. Our results proved to be similar to those of the empirical study by Ellison et al. (2007) and Cho et al. (2014), and confirmed that socializing and creation of relationships have positive effects on the intensive usage of social
Conclusions and limitations
To sum up, our study has expanded on previous studies and proposed several significant contributions. It has provided some better knowledge about the influence of UGC in the social media on generating tourists’ expectations about tourist destinations. First of all, our study provides a theoretical and innovative study that offers a global model of how a series of tourists' expectations are set up. To date, only some partial relationships among the variables have been described in the
Research interests of the authors
- 1.
Yeamduan Narangajavana, Tourism Marketing and Strategies, Customer Behaviour, and Social Media.
- 2.
Luis José Callarisa Fiol, Tourism Management and Marketing, Relationship Marketing, and Digital Marketing.
- 3.
Miguel Ángel Moliner Tena, Relationship marketing and customer loyalty.
- 4.
Rosa María Rodríguez Artola, International marketing and consumer behavior.
- 5.
Javier Sánchez García, Tourism Management and Marketing, and Service Marketing.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the Universitat Jaume I for the financial support of the research.
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