Role of social media in outbound leisure travel: an interpretive analysis of Indian travellers

Abstract

The role of social media (SM) in the travel process cannot be ignored. With a steady growth of the Indian travel industry, we find an upsurge in the number of Indians travelling to outbound destinations. This research aims to explore the travel behaviour and the usage of SM for travel purposes by Indian outbound leisure travellers during their entire travel process. It adopts a qualitative approach. Semi structured interviews were conducted with 30 respondents, who had travelled internationally for leisure over the past one year from the period of the study. A thematic analysis of interviews was conducted to identify manifest and latent contexts. In addition to the extent and scope of SM usage, the findings establish that the entire travel process is a cycle of pre-travel SM consumption and post-travel SM creation stages. There is a heavy usage of SM during the two stages though there is limited SM usage during-travel. The findings have been used to develop a conceptual model.

Unveiling the tourist’s social media cycle: use of social media during travel decision-making

“…So we confirm that social media influences tourist information acquisition to post-purchase behaviours (Singh et al , 2019; Mangold and Faulds, 2009). The cyclic nature of such social media usage was revealed when we noted that in the pre-travel stage, the tourists were still indulging in post-purchase behaviour, which is attributed to social media creation.…”

“…This can be attributed to the price conscious attitude of the price sensitive Indian tourists who indulge in extensive evaluation which is not just limited to information search so as to achieve the optimal value (Singh et al , 2019; Singh and Srivastava, 2019) as travel is a huge expense to Indian tourists. This is further complemented by “compare” option available on websites making comparison between the alternatives easy.…”

Muslim-Friendly Tourism Towards Good Tourism Governance

“…The first and most important role, the destination must strive to improve the social and economic well-being of the people living around the destination area. The second role is that the destination must be able to provide additional business opportunities for the welfare of the population by offering various activities or tourism experiences (Dredge & Jamal, 2015;Singh, Srivastava, & Dixit, 2019).…”