Determinant Factors Influencing Thai Tourists’ Intentions to Use Social Media for Travel Planning

Abstract

Currently, information technology plays an important role in the tourism industry. Tourists like to use social media more widely for their travel planning, which affects the high competition between entrepreneurs while facing the challenge of improving the quality of data services provided through social media. This study developed a model of the relationships between structure factors that affect intentions to use social media for travel planning. The said model integrates the technology acceptance model (TAM) theory, the theory of planned behavior (TPB), and trust and satisfaction factors. In reference to a survey of 1333 samples from domestic tourists who used social media through their smartphone, it was found that satisfaction, attitudes, subjective norms, and perception can be used to control behavior, with a positively direct effect on intentions of use. In addition, we examined the indirect effect on intentions of use. Perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and subjective norms had a positively significant indirect effect on intentions of use. These research results allow tourism entrepreneurs to precisely understand the stimulating factors of tourists’ intentions to use social media for travel-planning decisions, which will help lead to the development of tourism-marketing strategies and the support of sustainable competition.

Social Media as a Destination Marketing Tool for a Sustainable Heritage Festival in Nigeria: A Moderated Mediation Study

“…Meanwhile, in order to establish the relationships proposed in the model, partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed. The WarpPLS 7.0 [10,154] was utilized to analyze the model structure of this study. According to Kock [155], WarpPLS is "a partial least square regression procedure that is effective for analyzing both linear and non-linear relationship simultaneously" [10].…”

“…Revisiting a tourist's destination can only be achieved through satisfied tourists who may recommend the destinations to others. Therefore, dissatisfied tourists may express negative comments about a destination and damage the destination's market reputation [10,129]. Baker and Crompton [36] suggested that festival managers should focus their evaluative resources on assessing both festival quality and satisfaction level of attendees.…”

“…This is evident in some studies that have demonstrated the importance of social media sites for marketing purposes [1,[3][4][5][6], but its implications on tourism, especially, sustainability of heritage festivals, has not been exhaustively investigated. Therefore, it is important to understand how social media is used to market tourism destinations [4,6], and how consumers behave, socialize, and encourage each other using the new technology [7] to ensure tourism sustainability [8][9][10] with the related effect on the overall sustainable development [10,11]. Tourism destinations need to understand how to improve their social media marketing activities in order to differentiate their products and services from those of other competing tourism destinations [8,12].…”

International Tourism Development in the Context of Increasing Globalization Risks: On the Example of Ukraine’s Integration into the Global Tourism Industry

“…They are an ideal tool for finding information to plan travel and allow the tourist to make decisions in a simple and easy way. The bottom line is that the traveler shares a post related to an interesting tourist attraction, a route, as well as his experience in this journey, through social media, which attracts the attention and interest of other members of social networks (Cheunkamon et al 2020).…”

“…At present, information technology (Cheunkamon et al 2020;Cai et al 2019;Natorina 2020) plays an important role in a globalized world. Firoiu and Croitoru (2015) focus on the impact of information technology on the development of enterprises providing services to the international tourism industry.…”