Chapter 3 Social Media Impacts on Travelers

This chapter examines the impact social media can have on travelers’ behavior, through the integration of decision-making studies and travel planning theories. Influences of social media are analyzed for each step of the travel planning process: before leaving (pre-trip), during the stay (during-trip), and after having come back home (post-trip). The second part of the chapter focuses on travel experience sharing activity. In particular, reasons for sharing, dimensions of co-creation, and main mediators of travel experience are examined. Finally, demographics and various roles of social media users (lurkers, posters, and shoppers) are discussed. 3.1 Consumer Behavior in Tourism Travel services are mostly considered experience products (Cohen 1979; Uriely 2005; Moscardo 2010; Sundbo and Sørensen 2013), mainly intangible (Murray and Schlacter 1990; Gremler et al. 1994) whose quality is difficult to be evaluated prior to consumption (Rosen 2000, 2009; Dye 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2012). These features determine high customers’ involvement in buying decision practices and a consequent high-risk perception that usually generates a longer and more complex consumer behavior process (Murray and Schlacter 1990; Laroche et al. 2004). Furthermore, purchases of travel services more and more take place in the online environment where consumers’ behavior has specific features (Viglia 2014). In order to analyze how consumers buy tourism services, a brief review of the theories regarding purchasing process are presented. According to the decision-making studies, the traveler buying process consists of five stages: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior (Kotler et al. 2010; Zeithaml et al. 2012). Another perspective of analysis of the tourists’ planning process (travel planning theory) suggests a temporal perspective based on a process generally composed by © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 R. Minazzi, Social Media Marketing in Tourism and Hospitality, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05182-6_3 47 three phases: pre-trip, during-trip, and post-trip (Engel et al. 1990); the anticipatory phase, the experiential phase, and the reflective phase (Craig-Smith and French 1994; Jennings 1997, 2006). The first approach (decision-making studies) is supposed to be more related to people deciding for a single purchase (Jun et al. 2007), while the second one (travel planning theory) considers travel planning as more complex in nature as it implies interrelated actions about a combination of many services at the same time to achieve multiple goals (Stewart and Vogt 1999; Dellaert et al. 2014). Hereafter, we will try to integrate the two aforementioned approaches (decision-making studies and travel planning theory) considering the stages need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives and booking/purchase as part of the pre-trip phase (anticipatory), the consumption as part of the during-trip stage (experiential), and post-consumption as part of post-trip (reflective) (Table 3.1). Travel planning starts with the recognition of a need that can be generated by internal and external stimuli. Therefore, previous experience guides the customer toward a specific product that he or she knows could satisfy that specific need. Moreover, suggestions of other people, commercials, or other marketing stimuli can influence the customer’s identification of which activity could satisfy that need (Kotler et al. 2010). After having recognized their needs, people try to find information about goods and services able to grant satisfaction. Consumers generally employ both personal and nonpersonal sources in order to obtain thorough information (Zeithaml et al. 2012). Personal information comes from word-of-mouth spread by family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc., while nonpersonal information is represented by both online and offline commercial sources (corporate website, advertising, salespeople, etc.) and public/third parties sources (official classifications, customers reviews, ratings, rankings, awards, etc.) (Kotler et al. 2010). Table 3.1 The stages of consumers’ behavior and the travel planning process Consumer behavior stages Three-phase travel planning process