Inbound tourism influenced by social media: An Indian case study

Abstract

In 2014, the Union Government of India has set a target to achieve 1% share in global tourism arrivals in India, as expressed by the then Union Minister State for Tourism. In this regard, the role played by Social Media to influence the foreign tourist was significant. To analyze the causality between India, as a tourist destination and its presence on social media platform, a research study has been done which was fully funded by Ministry of Tourism, Government of India. The main objective was to study all the foreign tourists visiting India duly influenced by the social media. Due to the nature of the study, the technique of the focus-group interview has applied and then structured questionnaire has prepared to achieve the six objectives of the study. With a total sample size of 2,351 inbound tourists, collected in four phases during peak inbound tourist seasons from 2015 to 2016. The sample had consisted of the respondents from 93 nationalities and influenced by social media to visit India. The major outcomes were that majority of the inbound tourists came to know about India as a tourist destination through social media and then they explored more information specifically tourists attractions, to plan their trips to India. The majority of the tourists got influenced by Tripadvisor and Facebook platforms and reasonably satisfied with the information generated by the other social media sources. The results and conclusions have accepted by Ministry of Tourism, Government of India and utilized appropriately to gain the competitive advantage.

5G-Based Information Platform Design of Tourist Attractions in the Context of Mobile Big Data

“…At the transmitting end, signals of different transmit powers are completely multiplexed in frequency and distinguished only by power; at the receiving end, based on different channel gains, the serial interference cancellation algorithm is used to solve all users' signals in turn. Multiple access is one of the key technologies of the wireless physical layer [5,6]. In the field of wireless communication, the CSI is the channel attribute of the communication link.…”

Trustworthiness of inbound tourists on social media platforms towards destination choice

“…The information exchanged on social media has "become a major factor in influencing various aspects of consumer behaviour including awareness, information acquisition, opinions, attitudes, purchase behaviour, and post-purchase communication and evaluation" (Mangold, Faulds, 2009, 358). Invigorating this, studies (Fotis et al, 2012;Lange-Faria, Elliot, 2012;Manhas, Dogra, 2019;Tussyadiah, Fesenmaier, 2009) have demonstrated social media to have an impact on destination awareness and choice.…”

Social Media and Influencer Marketing for Promoting Sustainable Tourism Destinations: The Instagram Case

“…Besides static posts containing normal text, hashtag(s), and/or check-in data, referring to the location of Instagram stories is a common practice used in the promotion of tourism destinations by travel influencers [20]. An Instagram influencer's location history consists of (a) the rating history (e.g., per visited location) and (b) the check-in history followed by the related check-in location/geo-tag and geo-location hashtag [64]. When it comes to geo-tags/hashtags, the English language is generally used by Instagram travel influencers for boosting visibility and approaching more multilingual users [18,65].…”

“…It is a fact that there are many studies which show how social media influencers exert a positive impact on consumers' purchase intentions, e.g., [89,90], and how their endorsements have been found to increase favorable attitudes, intentions, and behaviors towards organizations [91,92]. Much research has also examined the impact of social media influencers on the selection of a tourism destination, e.g., [53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67]93]. The findings of this study essentially reaffirm the results of the previous studies and expand on the existing social media influencer theory by illustrating the significance of influencer marketing through Instagram for the attractiveness of tourism destinations that can be characterized as sustainable.…”