Young Tourists’ Trust in Instagram Travel Influencers and their Intention to Visit Travel Destinations

Abstract

This study is particularly interested in investigating how young tourists perceive and trust Instagram travel influencers and examine what aspects of the Instagram travel influencers' posts can successfully spark the intention of their followers to visit a destination promoted/recommended. This study employed a quantitative approach using a crosssectional study employing a non-probability sampling technique. A total of 366 young tourists responded to the questionnaire. This study computed SEM-PLS analysis using SmartPLS3 to test the model fit of the data and to explain the attributes that influence the intention to visit travel destinations among young tourists. Young tourists' are primarily influenced by the visual appeal, credible content and perceived popularity and engagement from Instagram travel influencers. Instagram travel influencers impact not only the decisionmaking and motivating travelers, but also on the tourism industry's marketers or business owners in terms of increased travel marketing potential. Destination marketers using Instagram influencers can utilize the findings of this study to strategize the attributes that lead the tourists to have the travel intention. Also, this study makes recommendations for Instagram travel influencers to incorporate important elements in their posts and stories to be more beneficial for their young followers.

The Impact of Instagram Reels on Youths’ Trust and their Holiday Intention

“…In the context of tourism and vacation contents, Instagram specifically Reels can definitely motivate, influence certain traveling decision and increase the tendency to travel especially among the young travellers (Anuar et al, 2021;Li, 2019;Yılmazdoğan et al, 2021). The contents available spread the choices and options of the destinations through exquisite fixed photos and especially the nicely edited Reels alongside with well narrated descriptions that contain necessary information and authentic reviews (Anuar et al, 2021;Han & Chen, 2021;Li, 2019;Yılmazdogan et al, 2021). From a certain angle, travel Reels can be viewed as reviews shared by the travellers; either influencers or not.…”

“…Tourism industry faced a decreasing number of tourists and visitors due to the pandemic of Covid19 (Anuar et al, 2021;Zhao et al, 2022). April 2022, the Malaysian government had announced that the nation has entered the endemic phase which many had taken the opportunity to travel to both local and abroad destinations.…”

“…Promotion on SocMed is viewed to be effective and more reliable. Many SocMed users especially the youths perceived obtaining information on the platforms are more convenient, essential and easy to access (Anuar et al, 2021;Kwak et al, 2021;Li, 2019;Tsai & Chu, 2017). The shared contents can somehow motivate the youths to initiate their travel intention and some even rely on the contents to assist them in their traveling planning (Han & Chen, 2021;Kwak et al, 2021;Moon & An, 2022;Tešin et al, 2022).…”

“…YouTube, and Facebook are the two main platforms that have the most users and considered as the most stable platforms (Kwak et al, 2021). Meanwhile, Instagram is rising among the youths (Anuar et al, 2021) and expected to have 1.44 billion users worldwide by year 2025 (Dixon, 2022) and as of October 2022, Malaysia had approximately 15.1 million users with majority of the users are between 25 to 34 years of age and followed by users between 18 -24 years old (Dixon, 2022;NapoleonCat, 2022).…”

“…Generally, Instagram is known and recognised as a photo sharing social network application where it manages to attract the young generation to browse and share their own contents captured using their smartphones (Anuar et al, 2021;Yılmazdoğan et al, 2021). Based on previous studies, the young generation prefer to spend more time on Instagram rather than Facebook because the application allows the users not only to instantly share their posts, but it provides tools that allowing the users to edit, and add effects on their contents before posting which will make the contents be more appealing (Menon, 2022;Yılmazdoğan et al, 2021).…”